MFS: When would you say that the US became an empire? And is it in decline?
HMS: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the US was part of the imperial frontier. They were the local elites cooperating with the British imperial center, until, of course, they launched the American Revolution. The historian Mark Egnal argues that at the time of the Revolution, these local elites were already imagining the construction of an empire in North America, making plans to kick out the French, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the native population, while striking deals with the British Empire.
The transformation of the US into the global hegemon is the result of two world wars, which knocked out several rivals, and the Cold War, which reduced its only potential challenger to a lower status. In historical terms, imperial dominance rested on the capacity to successfully wield violence. But if we want to understand how empire works, we need to disaggregate the sources of power and focus on concrete mechanisms.
Susan Strange is useful here. Her great contribution was in arguing that international relations, rather than being primarily about military force and geostrategic politics, were a subset of what we now call the international political economy. Resources precede and shape the exercise of violence. Strange also argued that the American empire operated through four sources of structural power: productive power, financial power, knowledge power, and military power. Her refusal to reduce power to a single dimension is helpful in considering imperial systems, because different forms of power are emphasized in different subordinated zones.
When it comes to productive power, we can see clearly that even as US firms remain far more profitable than Chinese ones, physical production is largely dominated by Chinese firms. But financial power pulls in the other direction: the dollar is the central unit of account for credit in global markets, and non-US banks create more dollar-denominated credit in offshore markets than banks in the US create in the domestic market. This is a huge source of infrastructural power that the US retains. In terms of knowledge, American universities used to be the best in the world, but they are now being systematically undermined by federal policy. As the only power with global reach, but with waning deterrence capabilities, the US is “semi-dominant” in military terms—there are now enormous limits to the sorts of wars it can wage.