This piece by Stratfor's Robert Kaplan is well worth your reading and makes many valid points, especially on what a 21st US hegemony will looks like. A key takeaway is here:
Ancient empires such as Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Mauryan India, and Han China may have been cruel beyond measure, but they were less cruel and delivered more predictability for the average person than did anything beyond their borders. Who says imperialism is necessarily reactionary? 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. The early modern empires of Hapsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey were well known for their relative tolerance and protection of minorities, including the Jews. Precisely because the Hapsburg imperialists governed a mélange of ethnic and religious groups stretching from the edge of the Swiss Alps to central Romania, and from the Polish Carpathians to the Adriatic Sea, they abjured ethnic nationalism and sought a universalism almost postmodern in its design. What followed the Hapsburgs were mono-ethnic states and quasi-democracies that persecuted minorities and helped ease the path of Nazism.
The main problem with empire is not just, as Kaplan points out, that empire is seen as undemocratic, coercive and suppressive of local aspirations, but that, in some respects much worse, great powers in 2014 are just not interested, even if they were otherwise capable, in being foreign administrators and foreign legionaries. It is not any lack of power holding back the desire to conquer, annex or otherwise direct the affairs of others but, rather, a disinterest in making others burdens one's own. The rebirth of prudence and consciousness of limits is to be contrasted with some of the more exuberant rhetoric that accompanied the US and Western ambitions for Afghanistan and Iraq.
The lack of great power interest in oppressing and exploiting people in weak, failed but valuable places is in some ways reflected more benignly by the lack of great power interest in even trying to help those in failed states such as, for example, Syria and Iraq. This is not to underestimate the effect of "War Fatigue" on western polities, especially in respect of any supposed humanitarian crises in the Arab world which seems to know nothing but humanitarian disasters that protagonists are only to keen to make problems for outside problems.
In any event, this salient lack of great power interest in empire, imperialism and formal annexations is augmented by the unsuitability of modern great powers, especially the United States, in supplying a governing class. This was a problem with the whole US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Where the Romans, the Spanish, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the British, the French and even the Dutch had classes of imperial administrator, the whole concept now is impossible to conceive of, as contra the spirit of our times. Who in the modern civil societies of any NATO power could be looked to or relied on to bring order to and then rule over a disparate territory in a largely fair and non-corrupt manner? The US and its NATO allies are, culturally and temperamentally, unlikely to now produce such proconsuls, pro-praetors and garrisons. In more simple terms, young Westerners do not aspire to rule the world as their forebears may once have done.
Saying all this may reflect 'progress' in the Whig sense but what then of those parts of the world persistently stuck in conflict, without hope of peace or prosperity, in the absence of some foreign, largely benevolent, outside power? As Kaplan says:
Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of imperial order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed.
Who or what power is to undertake this still relevant task today? A good question, posed regularly by horrific events over the last two decades, to which no satisfactory answer has been provided.
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