Should America Be a Bully?

Is it in America’s interest to throw around its considerable weight to get its way? That depends on your view of Thucydides and China.

Should America be a bully?

The Trump administration is upending a century of foreign policy. Now we’re pushing around weaker countries to advance our interests in hard-nosed, pragmatic, Talleyrand-Metternich-Bismarck realpolitik. We’re threatening Denmark to hand over Greenland. We’re jacking up tariffs on allies like Canada. We stopped foreign assistance. We threatened to pummel Colombia with tariffs to punish them for not taking back migrants. We pulled out of the World Health Organization and Paris Climate Agreement. We’re even making friendly overtures to Russia and implying it’s time to finish the War of 1812, formally incorporating Canada whether Canadians like it or not.

It’s a stark break. Since the Second World War, America went out of its way to create, support, and lead a great alliance of Western democracies and other friendly states. We gave them security guarantees and, when necessary, sent military interventions. We shared intelligence, and covered them under our nuclear umbrella. We protected global shipping and allowed any nation that played by our rules to share the bounty. We even committed to declaring war on anyone who attacked our friends. America didn’t bully friendly European nations like Denmark to hand over territory.

There’s a tendency to view all this as just the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump. No doubt, some of it stems from his view, formed over a business career, that the world is entirely a transactional, zero-sum, tit-for-tat negotiation. However, many smart and powerful people are in fact pushing and applauding this new direction—I would say driving it. There’s a new foreign policy philosophy afoot, one that crosses old political lines.

Leaving aside the moral questions of whether you think America pushing around weaker nations is fair, or nice, or part of our national character, is it smart? Why is this happening now, and what are the people behind it trying to achieve? Is it actually in America’s interest to throw around its considerable weight to get things it wants?

Like many matters these days, the answer turns on your perspective of a coming war with China.

AMERICA’S TRIBUTARY EMPIRE

America experimented with a genuine empire back around the turn of the twentieth century, and it didn’t take.

When America first emerged as the New World’s unrivaled superpower in the industrial age, it put its toe into the water of acting like Great Powers usually do and started to pick up colonies. It annexed the Kingdom of Hawaii. It took some colonies from Spain in the Spanish-American War—Cuba (which it granted independence), and Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines (which it kept). It scooped up some tiny Pacific island like Midway, Wake, and American Samoa, and supported Panama’s war of independence from Colombia to better secure a perpetual lease on the Panama Canal. It supported the Untied Fruit Company—America’s version of the British East India Company—fiddling around in Central America. This was all entirely different from pushing around Mexico to take new territory in the heartland. This was the beginning of a genuine colonial empire.

However, America didn’t really have it in it to play international bully. Of all these colonial adventures, only Hawaii and the tiny islands really worked out. After lusting after Cuba for over a century—it’s a very valuable island directly off America’s coast—America didn’t have the heart or the resolve to override the Cuban people’s desire for independence. The Philippines were too important as a Pacific naval coaling station to let go, so America had to employ often-brutal tactics there to suppress its independence, which became a rolling national embarrassment. The United Fruit Company’s “banana republic” hijinks was similarly embarrassing. Puerto Rico remains a uncomfortable question today.

Fundamentally, dominating other people conflicted with America’s self-image and national ethos. It was embarrassing to claim to be the world’s defender of democracy and freedom while also subjugating people, which in turn undercut political legitimacy at home. Subjugating foreign territory was more problem than it was worth. America was more comfortable as the international good guy staying within its own borders.

Then came World War II.

After the Allies defeated the Nazis, America was the sole remaining Great Power with a nearly untouched industrial base. Its new rival, the Soviet Union, was looking to use the opportunity of peace to spread its proletarian revolution across Europe and the world. The solution was to organize an alliance of democracies to hold back Soviet aggression. However, in light of new global power dynamics America would not just have to lead such an alliance. It would have to manage it, direct it, maintain it, and fund it, if it was going to work. What started as an alliance therefore quickly devolved into a tributary empire with a suzerain and vassals.

An empire of tributaries—vassals, client states, satellite states, puppets, or what have you—is an idea nearly as old as civilization. The Romans often used client states with client kings to maintain influence outside their already vast borders. The Persians maintained their satrapies. Chinese dynasties often maintained vassal kingdoms in Southeast Asia and Korea. The Mongols almost exclusively ruled their empire through a network of vassals, like Muscovy, and medieval Europe was bult around vassal relationships of counts, dukes, and kings.

The idea is the suzerain guarantees security and access to a network of internal trade, while vassals pledge troops and resources when the suzerain calls. The vassal is otherwise sovereign and free to manage its affairs with limited interference from the suzerain. This is often a good deal for both sides. The vassal gets the protection of a powerful suzerain, while maintaining its independence. The suzerain gets security and control outside its borders, as well as material support in times of crisis, without having to spend the considerable cost and effort necessary to directly subjugate another people.

It's messy to admit the American alliance system is really a tributary system of suzerain and vassals, but let’s be serious. America makes the decisions. It’s pledged to protect its members. It maintains and defends the trade network on which everyone depends. It expects members to follow its lead and contribute resources. It maintains military bases and installations in their territory. It receives and shares intelligence. When America requests support, whether through international votes or militarily, “allies” are expected to comply. America’s “partners” have more internal independence than classical vassals, and are free in many ways to thumb their nose at the suzerain, but whatever you call this arrangement as a polite fiction, it’s fundamentally a tributary empire led by a suzerain—the United States. Like the Pax Romana, or Pax Britannica, this is the Pax Americana.

Although most Americans are entirely ignorant of it, this tributary empire is also the reason America is absurdly rich in comparison to rest of the developed world. America makes the rules of global trade—naturally to its benefit. American companies get to operate in a world in which every rule is crafted specifically for their benefit, and administered by friendly officials. The world speaks English. Americans with no more than a high school education can do business or travel anyplace on earth, without having to spend years studying a language. America’s currency is the world reserve currency, meaning America can run up its astronomical national debt without its economy collapsing. America can set up military installations, naval bases, and missile silos in any corner of the earth. It can snatch up enemies from anywhere on the planet, and whisk them away to black sites if it chooses. You as an American have the wealth and resources you do because America maintains this global empire of tributaries.

Maintaining and defending this global empire, however, has substantial costs. Sometimes that means supplying weapons, intervening in foreign struggles, or directly sending troops into proxy wars. When vassals need support, America is expected to help, even when it has no direct interest. America also must sometimes sacrifice its own narrow interests to maintain vassal relationships, dignity, and support. Defending the empire also requires a fair bit of dirty work. Sometimes that means invading places, overthrowing regimes, spies, arming insurgents, or pressuring foreign citizens to obey our will. For a democratic nation built around ideals of freedom and democracy, these hypocrisies are costly and embarrassing.

The political left has long criticized this empire for its moral costs—all the wars, spies, coups, and compromises to America’s integrity, they view as too dirty for a democratic republic. They want America to maintain the alliances without the empire—as if that was possible, when the alliance and empire are two sides of the same thing. A resurgent line of thinking on the political right holds the empire isn’t worth the blood and treasure. Maintaining the empire requires costly interventions, with America’s legions regularly marching off to defend the agendas of vassals around the globe. It also constrains American policy, requiring it to hold back its national interests and take less than it could, or as much as any other nation would. They believe America would be stronger standing alone without the empire.

At least throughout the twentieth century, I would say the benefits of the empire vastly exceeded its admittedly significant costs—resources, blood, lost opportunities, national hypocrisies, betrayals of values, and gold. These costs are what made America powerful and rich, and if all the trade rules, special privileges, and reserve currency went up into smoke, we would all be staggeringly poorer. The American middle class would likely live today closer to the standards of other industrial nations like the UK, Italy, or France. I also doubt America would be any stronger. Any resources saved retracting from the world ultimately would needed to have been spent as new threats pushed closer to home, putting us in the same place but from a weaker position.

However, even if that’s true, is it still true now? Your answer has to do with your view of the rise of China.

CHINA AND THUCYDIDES

Most serious thinkers quietly believe we’re on the path to a war with China because of the Thucydides Trap.

Thucydides was an ancient Athenian historian and military leader who came to believe the devastating Peloponnesian War had been inevitable. Athens, then enjoying it Golden Age under Athenian Democracy, was Ancient Greece’s superpower. Sparta, a rising militaristic power, couldn’t claim its due without Athens making way. It was therefore in Sparta’s interest to wage a war against Athens as soon as it thought it could win to force Athens to recognize its new position. It was also in Athens’ interest to put down Sparta as soon as possible, before it gained even more power as a rival. Both needed to beat the other, making the devastating war that wrecked them both inevitable.

Another example of this dynamic was the First World War, in which a newly-united and industrializing Germany played the role of rising power. Britain and France now played the role of established powers. Germany—still treated like a second-rate nation, but arguably now Europe’s strongest—couldn’t claim its due without Britain and France making space, which neither was inclined to do. It was therefore in everyone’s interest to have war, and when the mess of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s death gave them all a reason, they eagerly jumped in. Harvard political scientist Graham Allison conducted a study of sixteen historical circumstances in which a rising power rubbed up against a ruling one. In twelve of them, there was a war.

China is the rising power. America is the ruling power. For China to get what it believes is its due, America must give way. China wants America to back off in the Pacific, likely abandoning allies like Taiwan and Japan. It wants America to release its stranglehold on international standards and trade, allowing China to make its own rules. China is exerting interests in places America traditionally has, like Africa, the Middle East, and even South America. America might even be forced to give up its global reserve currency, which is currently keeping its near-ruinous national debt manageable.

This doesn’t mean there has to be a war. It does mean one is possible. Like in Sparta, many in China believe war with America is inevitable and in their interest, and dream of launching one the minute they think they can win. Like in Athens, some in America also believe war is inevitable and think the sooner it comes the better, since China gets stronger by the day. If such a war broke out, it’s impossible to say for sure who would win it. America has the clear advantage in twentieth-century warfare, but a twenty-first century war would be conducted with new technologies. Would our carriers still dominate the seas, or prove as useful as WWII’s mighty battleships facing that era’s new technology? Nobody knows.

In light of this danger looming, does America’s tributary empire still make sense?

PLAYING OUT THE GAME

What would you do if you believed America’s vassals were no longer useful?

Some people look at the Western alliance and see a collection of vassal nations that can no longer pull their weight. Europe is shrinking economically in relation to other Great Powers, and at a rapid pace. Its nations have advanced but small militaries that both America and China would swat away as pests. They’re currently roiled by internal problems like migration. They’re continually in friction with America, and their governments hinder and spar with American businesses and interests they want to counter and control. Their populations are increasingly ambivalent, if not hostile, to America. In a direct conflict with China, how useful are these vassals? What would they contribute? Would they even contribute, or seek to break the implicit deal formed to fight the defunct Soviets and remain neutral? Outside Europe, China is growing in influence in places like Africa, South America, and the Middle East. The only place America still seems to have solid influence is Asia, among the nations directly threated by a more assertive China, who will be with us anyway.

If you were playing some complex strategy game like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, and you saw the world this way, what would your move be?

You might consider unwinding your no longer useful satellite relationships. Why spend blood and treasure maintaining an umbrella for vassals you aren’t sure can, or will, contribute when war eventually arrives? Then you might seek to harden your home base of North America. You might secure your northern border in Canada, an economically valuable area in your cultural zone and strategic necessity. To make sure it doesn’t drift out of your influence at a time in which it’s moving the same direction as Europe, perhaps you consider whether you might take control of it directly. You would also want to control resource-laden Greenland, in the hands of a perhaps unreliable European Denmark, to ensure no Chinese assets wound up there. On your uncontrolled southern border, you would consider intervening to ensure a stable and friendly government in Mexico. It would be essential to also regain direct control of the Panama Canal, which China is currently making efforts to control. Finally, you might patch up relations with the remaining power that could help to counter China—Russia. You can count on the Asian powers bordering China who need to counter Chinese influence, but Russia also borders China, and it could be a major help or, as a Chinese ally, horrific nuclear-armed opponent.

Moves that look crazy on the surface suddenly start to make some sense.

Personally, I don’t believe these are the correct moves. If I were playing the game, instead of cutting my vassals loose, I would make a priority of strengthening them instead. I would force them to resolve their internal issues and restore their vitality and stability, even when they didn’t like it. I would counter growing anti-American attitudes and policies. I wouldn’t do this through appeasement or flattery, but by playing hard ball to build renewed counter-institutions around a new twenty-first set of ideas that ensure, when the time came, they could, and would, be there to help. In fact, I think that’s the only real strategy to avoid a war, or if necessary win one.

The best counter to the Thucydides Trap is to appear too strong to fight. The tributary empire is better at achieving that. The second-best is to quickly win the war before it wrecks you. I’m not sure whether a hardened North American empire wins a war against China. To me, it looks weaker than China: fewer people, fewer resources, less productive capacity, increasingly equal technology, and none of the strategic benefits the tributary empire brings that we’ve come to take for granted. I would rather go to war as the head of the Western alliance than a hardened, but smaller, North American empire. I also just don’t think direct empire suits America, or that one would take any more than it did the first time. This isn’t the Roman Empire, a diverse nation that can survive without its republican institutions or common creed. America can’t betray its principles and hold together its republic, and if its republic goes, so does America itself. Unlike Rome, America won’t continue in a new form, but fall apart.

The tributary empire was a brilliant solution to a difficult problem. It was never just a giveaway to other nations. It was never a pointless war machine to generate profit for America. It was never just naïve idealism. It was the only way a democratic republic could somehow maintain the values on which its very survival depends, while also maintaining dominion around the globe. If we let it go and fall into the Thucydides Trap, we’re going to miss it.

Do you think America should be a bully? Join the conversation in the comments.