But hasn’t September 11 changed that somewhat? What that event did was end isolationism. What it proved is that a reluctance to get involved in the world wasn’t merely a moral or strategic choice of whether to intervene in other countries – i.e. Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda. It was a matter of necessity to prevent an attack on America itself. What Osama bin Laden did was what neoconservatives never fully persuaded Americans of – that America’s destiny is necessarily an imperial one. This doesn’t mean occupying everywhere – or anywhere for that matter. Technology has made warfare and empire something that can be done at a great distance and with few casualties. Moreover, the sheer gulf between the level of American power in almost every field and the rest of the world is not shrinking. It’s growing. At the end of the Cold War, America’s share of the world economic pie was around 22 percent. With the collapse of Russia and Japan and the sclerosis affecting continental Europe, the U.S. share is now 30 percent. American productivity growth since the mid-1990s has merely exacerbated this differential. Here’s Paul Kennedy, former theorist of American decline, changing his mind in the Financial Times:
In 1985, the Pentagon’s budget equalled 6.5 per cent of gross domestic product and was seen by many as a cause of US budgetary and economic-growth problems. By 1998, defence spending’s share of GDP was down to 3.2 per cent, and today it is not much greater. Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single superpower on the cheap is astonishing… [Today], a full 45 per cent of all internet traffic takes place in this one country. About 75 per cent of the Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics and medicine in recent decades do their research and reside in America. A group of 12 to 15 US research universities have, through vast financing, moved into a new superleague of world universities that is leaving everyone else – the Sorbonne, Toyko, Munich, Oxford, Cambridge – in the dust, especially in the experimental sciences. The top places among the rankings of the world’s biggest banks and largest companies are now back, to a large degree, in US hands. And if one could reliably create indicators of cultural power – the English language, films and television, advertisements, youth culture, international student flows – the same lopsided picture would emerge.
When you add to this the current projections for future Pentagon defense spending, the empire so feared by people like Gore Vidal is no longer a theory. It is a reality. This preponderance of real global power is literally unique in the history of the world. And the one thing holding it back – America’s ambivalence and isolationism – is lying in the rubble of the World Trade Center. The further you get from America, the clearer this is. And we have only begun to think through the full consequences.
The Dish 