Is the giant, America, now an empire?

Joseph S. Nye, Dean, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Project Syndicate

Three decades ago, the radical left used the term "American empire" as an epithet. Now that same term has come out of the closet: Analysts on both the left and right now use it to explain -- if not guide -- American foreign policy.

In many ways, the metaphor of empire is seductive. The American military has a global reach, with bases around the world, and its regional commanders sometimes act like proconsuls. English is a lingua franca like Latin. The U.S. economy is the largest in the world, and American culture serves as a magnet. But it is a mistake to confuse primacy with empire.

The U.S. is certainly not an empire in the way we think of the European empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, because the core feature of that imperialism was political power. Although unequal relationships between the U.S. and weaker powers certainly exist and can be conducive to exploitation, the term "imperial" is not only inaccurate but misleading in the absence of formal political control.

To be sure, the U.S. now has more power resources relative to other countries than Britain had at its imperial peak. But the U.S. has less power -- in the sense of control over other countries' internal behavior -- than Britain did when it ruled a quarter of the globe.

For example, British officials controlled Kenya's schools, taxes, laws and elections -- not to mention its external relations. America has no such control today. In 2003, the U.S. could not even get Mexico and Chile to vote to support a second resolution on Iraq in the UN Security Council.

Devotees of the New Imperialism would say, "Don't to be so literal." After all, "empire" is merely a metaphor. But the problem with the metaphor is that it implies a degree of American control that is unrealistic, and reinforces the prevailing strong temptations towards unilateralism in both the U.S. Congress and parts of the Bush administration.

In the global information age, strategic power is simply not so highly concentrated. Instead, it is distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game.

On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar, but on the economic board, the U.S. is not a hegemon or an empire, and it must bargain as an equal when, for example, Europe acts in a unified way. On the bottom chessboard of transnational relations, power is chaotically dispersed, and it makes no sense to use traditional terms such as unipolarity, hegemony, or American empire.

So those who recommend an imperial U.S. foreign policy based on traditional military descriptions of American power are woefully misguided. In a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on one board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections among them.

Witness the connections in the war on terrorism between military actions on the top board, where the U.S. removed a tyrant in Iraq, but simultaneously increased the ability of al- Qaeda to gain new recruits on the bottom transnational board.

These issues represent the dark side of globalization. They are inherently multilateral and require cooperation for their solution. So to describe America as an empire fails to capture the true nature of the foreign policy challenges that America faces.

Those who promote the idea of an American empire also misunderstand the underlying nature of American public opinion and institutions. Will the American public tolerate an imperial role? Neo-conservatives writers like Max Boot argue that the U.S. should provide troubled countries with the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in pith helmets.

But, as the British historian Niall Ferguson points out, modern America differs from 19th century Britain in its "chronically short time frame."

America was briefly tempted into real imperialism when it emerged as a world power a century ago, but the interlude of formal empire did not last long. Unlike Britain, imperialism has never been a comfortable experience for Americans, and only a small share of its military occupations led directly to the establishment of democracies.

American empire is not constrained by economics: The U.S. devoted a much higher percentage of its GDP to military spending during the Cold War than it does today. Its imperial overreach will instead come from having to police more peripheral countries than U.S. public opinion will accept.

Indeed, opinion polls in America show little popular taste for empire and continuing support for multilateralism and using the UN. Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian advocate of the imperial metaphor, qualifies it by referring to America's role in the world as "Empire Lite."

In fact, the problem of creating an American empire might better be termed imperial underreach. Neither the U.S. public nor Congress has proven willing to invest seriously in the instruments of nation building and governance as opposed to military force.

Indeed, the entire State Department budget is only 1 percent of the federal budget. The U.S. spends nearly seventeen times as much on its military, and there is little indication that this is about to change.

So the U.S. should avoid the misleading metaphor of empire as a guide to its foreign policy. Empire will not help America to understand and cope with the challenges it faces in the global information age of the 21st century. Chess, anyone?

The writer, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, is the author of The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone.