Vietnam

One of the most significant policy failures of US hegemony, and one that first gave credence to the possibility that US hegemony was headed toward breakdown was the Vietnam War. Many different reasons have been given for the miscalculation of the US in Vietnam and it is beyond the scope of this article to delve into them all. The more limited purpose here is to compare overreach vs. overstretch as explanations and in particular to consider the importance of ideological-cultural factors as compared to more purely economic or military-strategic factors in the decision to intervene.

Certainly one of the principle reasons for the US invasion of Vietnam was the misinterpretation of the nature of the Vietnamese revolution as primarily part of the world communist conspiracy rather than a national revolution. This is how President Lyndon Johnson characterised the war:

Because of its crusade against communism the US saw not only the Vietnamese conflict, but virtually every local anti-colonial rebellion and regional conflict as part of its global struggle with communism. Local and regional forces were either good supporters of the ‘free’ world or agents of the communist dark side. That the forces the US was fighting against could be more nationalist than communist was beyond US policymakers ability to conceive.

US forces may have been stretched thin around the world by this global crusade as was recognised by the Nixon Doctrine which was proclaimed upon retreat from Vietnam. But the reason why the US had so many missions must also be examined carefully. The interests of the West and its corporations stretch far and wide around the world. But few major corporate interests were at stake in Vietnam. The ‘domino theory’ suggested that if Vietnam fell more obvious assets like Indonesia, the Philippines, or even eventually Japan might be at risk. Yet in fact when Vietnam went, the rest of Indochina fell, but no further dominos toppled. So perhaps we should also take seriously the messianic mindset that sought to save the entire world from godless communism as a real ideological and cultural force in driving the US commitment in remote Vietnam. Maybe the real geostrategic lesson of Vietnam is that reach exceeded grasp.

Iraq

The Vietnam War or the current Iraq War were not strictly speaking caused by imperial overstretch. Rather, they were conscious choices of the hegemonic power which could very easily have chosen not to fight in these countries. In both cases the vast majority of US allies cautioned against going to war; in both cases that counsel was not heeded.

No one knows the long-term outcome of the current conflict in Iraq, but the ability of the US to establish a pro-Western government is still in doubt. What is certain is that the invasion triggered a bitter Sunni-Shia civil war with hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of refugees. Instead of spurring a wave of liberalisation in the Muslim world, the war has also created enemies and lost supporters for the US throughout Muslim and non-Muslim worlds alike.

The US invasion of Iraq is more easily explained by traditional economic and geostrategic factors than the US invasion of Vietnam (or Wilson's master plan for postwar peace). Iraq has huge oil reserves and is strategically located in the region that produces most of the world's oil exports. It is clear that the US and its allies have massive material interests at stake in the Middle East.

Yet the very fact that the US and several of its key allies have differed so sharply on strategy toward Iraq since 9/11 shows that something more than raw material interest drove the US invasion of Iraq. In the first Gulf War under the first President Bush, the US had virtually unanimous support of its major allies and either troops or major financial and logistical support from France, Germany, and Canada as well as Britain, Italy, and Japan. In the current war in Iraq, while the governments of Britain, Italy, and Japan supported the US, France, Germany, and Canada pointedly refused to do so. Popular support in Europe and major allies in Asia has always been low. Several early supporters of the war, such as Italy and Spain, have withdrawn their troops and others are preparing to do so.

When nations that all are heavily reliant on imported oil have such sharply different policies toward the world's leading oil exporting region, one must look at other factors beyond simple dependence on foreign oil. Other material interests could be invoked. France's long standing oil contracts with the Saddam regime have often been used to explain French reluctance to take a hard line, as has the high number of Arabs residing in France compared to the low number of Jews. Yet neither of these factors deterred France from sending troops in the first Gulf War. And neither of these factors was at play in Canada's or Germany's decision not to back the US in the Second War after they did in the First War.

Perhaps we need to look more carefully at the official motivations proffered by the Bush administration. President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address to the American people, before the invasion, played on post-9/11 fears and stressed the issue of WMD. Bush accused Saddam Hussein of potentially having

Bush also claimed

One year later, in his 2004 State of the Union speech, after no WMD had been found, Bush's justifications had shifted, and the war was now part of a grander strategy of freedom and democratic peace for the entire Middle East.

The very fact that the ideological validations for the war could shift so dramatically in one year shows they cannot be taken at face value, that more base economic and geostrategic interests also lie behind the more noble rationalisations. Yet just because something is not entirely true does not mean it is not believed. Although Washington (and London) may have grossly exaggerated reports of WMD in Iraq, many may still have sincerely believed that Saddam was attempting to regain weapons he in fact once did have, even if they clearly exaggerated the meager empirical evidence that backed their assumptions.

Similarly, just because the US has historically acted more often to crush democratic movements in the Middle East than to promote them, it does not follow that the rhetoric about democratising Iraq was not serious. Neoconservatives, emboldened by the breakdown and assimilation of the former Soviet empire, had articulated this aggressive transformational agenda toward the Middle East before Bush came to office and specifically targeted Saddam Hussein's Iraq.Footnote ¹² Neoconservatives might well have simply wished away the real dilemma between establishing a post-Saddam regime that would be pro-American versus a post-Saddam regime that would reflect the true will of the Iraqi people by the typical American exceptionalist assumption that Arab people want to emulate Americans but are simply held back by reactionary governments and religious leaders. In a historically messianic US traumatised by 9/11 but still comforted by post-Cold War triumphalism, the neoconservative project of combating rising terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism by transforming Iraq into an oasis of liberal democracy in the desert of Middle Eastern autocracy sounded a sweet siren's song. Surely the US has neoimperial ambitions in Iraq, but its original ambitions were actually much greater than merely economic or geostrategic. In fact, they were truly revolutionary. They reached far beyond what could reasonably have reasonably been expected to have been achieved.

Wilson's postwar vision

Of the three policy failures cited in this section, the one that most clearly demonstrates the superiority of hegemonic overreach against overstretch is Wilson's failure to achieve his visionary goals in the post-World War I settlement. The theory of overstretch hypothesises that hegemonic power degrades over time, like a physical substance being subjected to repeated stress. If characteristic miscalculations and failures are significant factors early in the hegemonic cycle that weighs heavily against life-cycle theories of decline and overstretch as principle explanations of hegemonic failure.

Policy goals that reach far beyond capabilities available and missionary ideology that drives global transformational goals that cannot be realised can be seen from the very dawning of US hegemony, after the US had played a decisive role in the outcome of the first world war. Woodrow Wilson, the US president and the son of the preacher, struck such a dramatic pose at the Paris Peace Conference as a man on a mission to reform world politics. The story is so well known it does not need retelling here.

Yet Wilson's bold declarations about self-determination of peoples and peaceful settlement of international disputes went essentially unheeded as the leading imperial powers carved up the Ottoman Empire's territories, applied the concept of disarmament only to Germany, and, while creating a League of Nations, did not give it sufficient power to influence the outcome of international conflicts. Wilson's reach so exceeded his grasp that even his own country's Senate rejected the treaty that only marginally reflected his transformational agenda.

It could be argued that Wilson's failure is not quite the same as the failure in Vietnam and the unfolding potential failure in Iraq because the US had not yet the established itself as global hegemon. However, Wilson's postwar plan was clearly designed to create US hegemony. The US had most of the capabilities to step up as the hegemon in the post-World War I world. American hegemonists simply misplayed their hand, first by Wilson's overreaching at the peace conference, then back home by not managing the subsequent Republican opposition to the Treaty of Versailles and mastering the diplomacy necessary to carry out hegemonic strategy. Why did the US succeed in establishing its hegemony after the World War II when it failed after World War I? The standard answer that US power was more overwhelming because the old European powers were so much more thoroughly destroyed and needed help facing the threat of the Soviet Union and international communism has great merit, but it leaves out some nuances that are important for understanding the later development of US hegemony. As the Cold War unfolded, because of its anti-communist, anti-Soviet mission, the US reined in its reformist zeal and took a more realist approach to the European powers and Japan. And because they were under such grave threat, the other major powers were willing to tolerate American messianic enthusiasm, because a savior was precisely what they were seeking.

The early Cold War masked the conflict between the missionary proclivities of US foreign policy and the interests of other capitalist powers that were more apparent when Wilson came to Paris, during the Vietnam War, and after the end of the Cold War.

What price success?

Even prominent US policy ‘successes’ during the Cold War have later proven to be cases of hegemonic overreach because of ‘blowback’, or counterproductive long-term consequences.Footnote ¹³ In the 1950s a popular revolution in Iran ousted the British-created and US-supported Shah of Iran. The CIA quickly engineered a counterrevolution to bring the Shah back to power.

In 1979 the Shah was ousted again, this time by the Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, which established the theocracy which was ideological inspiration for rising fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world. The additional quarter of a century of repression by the Shah that US intervention had produced had enraged the Iranian people, liquidated democratic and popular forces that might have channeled that anger in a progressive direction, and thus paved the way for a reactionary fundamentalist revolution. The US had the power to help impose a regime on the Iranian people and help keep it in government for a generation, but it could not control the long-term consequences of its actions. Now the US is facing down a militant Islamic state apparently pursuing nuclear weapons. Once again, US reach exceeded its grasp.

US support for mujahadin in Afghanistan is another example of the US cold warriors helping empower forces that would come back to haunt them. During the Cold War, when the religious fundamentalists were pointing their guns at the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, the US counted them as the good guys and was actually providing them with weapons. The fall of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan was a major triumph in US policy, one of the first in the series of shocks that led to the fall of the Soviet empire. However, the swiftness and totality of the collapse of the Soviet system indicates that fall was heavily overdetermined, that it was bound to happen regardless of any particular historical sequence. The fall of the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan probably sped up the coming of the collapse and the US support for the mujahadin probably helped their cause. But the depth of Muslim hostility to the Soviet system was revealed in the absolute and total flight of all the Muslim republics out of the Soviet Union once Gorbachev lifted political repression. US aid to the mujahadin was almost certainly superfluous to the end of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and even more so to the overall fall of the Soviet empire.

However, the US aid was perhaps not incidental to the more local issue of who won out in post-Soviet Afghanistan. Certainly the money, weapons, and training provided to fundamentalist militants were substantial to small, irregular groups trying to establish themselves as independent fighting units and make a name for themselves among anti-Soviet forces. The US cannot claim full credit for the collapse of the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, yet it cannot escape some of the responsibility for the kind of government that succeeded it. Of course, the Taliban government that was to some degree a creature of US intervention in the 1980s became the symbol of state support for terrorism in 2001. Unlike the war in Iraq, there was a clear link between the Taliban and the militants who attacked the US, and therefore, there was broad international support for the original US-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban. However, just as in Iraq, long-term presence of Western militaries in an Islamic country has come to be perceived more as a foreign occupation than liberation. The implications of US ‘successes’ in Iran in the 1950s and Afghanistan in the 1980s are profound for the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Several years after the invasion of Afghanistan the Taliban still operates in the countryside, US intelligence confirms that Al-Qaeda is stronger than at any time since the invasion, and the neighbouring Pakistani central government is in a weaker position versus Islamic militants. In Iraq, in the long run, US ‘success’ in establishing a partially functioning pro-American regime in Baghdad would probably do more to stimulate the forces of Islamic fundamentalism across the Arab and Muslim world than an early US retreat. Today, a permanent US military presence in Iraq hardly seems likely to herald a rising tide of liberal democratisation in the Muslim world, but US forces certainly have already become a symbol of infidel oppression, and a spur to a new surge of Islamic fundamentalist resistance to Western domination.

US messianic mission as a cause of overreach

Yet a hegemon infused with a sense of messianic mission to transform the world has skewed judgment. It is consistently going to make wrong choices – choices on the side of intervention. To understand the causes of overreach during the era of US hegemony it is crucial to look at the contradiction between the demands of hegemony and the ideologies and practices of US foreign policy developed long before the US grasped hegemony. From the founding of the US there has been a kind of messianic mission driving US foreign policy, a sense of almost religious calling, an almost revolutionary zeal to transform a backward world, an assumption that the world should be reshaped in America's image.Footnote ¹⁴

Due to its pre-hegemonic formative experiences, the US has always been qualitatively different than the British or any hegemonic predecessor.Footnote ¹⁵ It is not American liberalism that is unique. Britain and the Netherlands were liberal hegemons. It is not US expansionism that is unique. Britain and the Netherlands sought to expand the scope of their power. What is qualitatively different about US hegemony is its sense of messianic mission.

From the first attempts of the US to step up as a leading world power at the post-World War I peace conference, the US has sought more aggressively to transform international political and economic systems in its liberal image. The missionary impulse certainly was not unknown in European colonial experience, from the Church's desire to Christianise the natives to France's mission civilisatrice to the British empire's sense of its political and economic institutions as an ideal for colonial emulation. However, few doubt the unique breadth and depth of the US mission to transform the global system.Footnote ¹⁶

A key source of this difference lies in US historical experience. The origin of the American sense of messianic mission lies in the belief of many of the religious sects that came to the New World for freedom of worship that North America was the promised land of the Bible and that they were God's new chosen people, literally replacing the apostate Jews. The new covenant of God's new chosen people was to spread the salvation of the New Testament throughout the New World. As the new American nation was forged on a ‘new’ continent uncorrupted by the conflicts and oppressions of Europe, the US was portrayed as the new home of liberty and the best hope of mankind. From the very founding of the nation the sacred and secular justifications of America's special role in the world were married. The frame of missionary zeal to save souls and spread the realm of the Savior became fused with a missionary zeal to save the world from oppression and spread the domain of liberal democracy. Conveniently for emerging capitalists and state builders, the ‘empire of liberty’ Jefferson proclaimed soon discovered a ‘manifest destiny’ to conquer the North American continent, with little concern for the liberties of the native peoples or Mexicans who stood in the way or the slaves who suffered in building the new nation.Footnote ¹⁷

America's history as a nation built on immigration also played a key role in both creating the American sense of global mission and in socialising new waves of citizens into the ideology of Americanism. People from around the world came to the US and were made over into Americans, leaving the more nationalistic of the American elite with the impression that most of the world wants to become Americans. It is only a slight parody to say that from this point of view, those who have not yet made the passage to America are simply weaker and lack the will compared to their stronger brethren who have already made it.

These immigrants from diverse nations, religions, and cultures were poured into the ‘melting pot’ of American culture and ‘Americanized’ through a systematic process of indoctrination into a civic culture of liberal capitalism, rugged individualism, democracy of white males, nationalist expansionism, and ‘Manifest Destiny’ through public schools and political propaganda in the mass media. It was no accident that the random cacophony of peoples that desperately fled to the North American continent in the 18th and 19th centuries was molded into the unified, purposeful global hegemon of the 20th century. And while it was not part of a master plan, neither is it a random event that the US attitude toward the entire planet in the 20th and 21st centuries is not that different than the American attitude toward North America in the 19th century.

By the time the conquest of the North American continent was completed, the US was the leading industrial power, and the US was ready to step up on the world stage. Visions of an empire of liberty and manifest destiny had been transmuted into a world historical mission to liberalise and democratise, as well as sometimes to Christianise, the whole world. In the 20th century the secular liberal democratic version of mission grew stronger, particularly during the Cold War when the US subordinated somewhat its own ideological tendencies to the requisites of leading a global alliance system. Woodrow Wilson unabashedly expressed his belief in the US as a Savior nation in religious terms rarely seen during the Cold War. However there has been a religious revival going on in the US for a generation and a re-sacralisation of politics beginning in the 1980s and intensifying in the first decade of the 21st century. The openly religious version of the Savior nation has returned to public prominence along with the more secular liberal democratic mission it spawned.

Figure 1.

The sacred and secular versions of American messianic mission.

Those who question the power of these beliefs tend to also be those who are baffled by US behaviour in the world or the willingness of the wider population to follow elites into overseas adventures. These are the deep mindsets that drive American overreach in its era of hegemony. And these are the organic ideologies that have been formulated and updated over centuries to induce obedience of citizens and soldiers.

The American transformational mission cannot be fully grasped without understanding US economic and geostrategic interests as the hegemonic state.Footnote ¹⁸ But neither can it be truly understood without grasping the messianic impulses that lie deep in American history and culture. The twin pillars of religious doctrine and secular liberalism that lie at the heart of US hegemony, the ‘fusion of Puritan piety and Lockian liberalism’, can be seen in the son of a Christian minister Woodrow Wilson, the first US president to clearly articulate the concepts of US hegemony and whose name is still synonymous with them.Footnote ¹⁹ Speaking of the US forces in World War I, Wilson's sense of religious mission shines through:

And Wilson also clearly saw the US as expression of God's will on earth:

While over the years it has often been judged wise not to express directly overt religious sentiments in international fora and the ideology itself has become more secularised, the same sense of global mission to transform the world has been consistent for almost a century. And the openly religious version of this missionary idealism is once again in vogue, reflecting changing US political, social, and religious dynamics.Footnote ²² In his second Inaugural Address, often taken as the defining speech of his presidency, George W. Bush, openly expressing long held views, sounds much like Wilson nearly a hundred years ago. Although at one point he explicitly denies seeing the US as the ‘chosen nation’ of God, the rest of the text shows a profound sense of divine mission. President Bush clearly believes that ‘God moves and chooses’ in human history and the direction ‘He’ chooses for ‘all the world’ is American style liberty.

The American impulse to rework the world in its image comes not only from its corporate and political imperatives but also at a deeper level from fundamental cultural, ideological, and even religious beliefs, not only from its calculations of power, but from its sense of its manifest destiny, once taken as a charge to rule over North America, now conceived on even a grander scale to be a mission to literally save the world.