Pax Americana

From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the First World War in 1914, the United Kingdom played the role of offshore-balancer in Europe, where the balance of power was the main aim. It was also in this time that the British Empire became the largest empire of all time. The global superiority of British military and commerce was guaranteed by dominance of a Europe lacking in strong nation-states, and the presence of the Royal Navy on all of the world's oceans and seas. In 1905, the Royal Navy was superior to any two navies combined in the world. It provided services such as suppression of piracy and slavery. In this era of peace, though, there were several wars between the major powers: the Crimean War, the Franco-Austrian War, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Russo-Japanese War, as well as numerous other wars. La Belle Époque, William Wohlforth argued, was rather Pax Britannica, Pax Russica and later Pax Germanica, and between 1853 and 1871 it was not Pax of any kind.[24]

During the Pax Britannica, America developed close ties with Britain, evolving into what has become known as a "special relationship" between the two. The many commonalities shared with the two nations (such as language and history) drew them together as allies. Under the managed transition of the British Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations, members of the British government, such as Harold Macmillan, liked to think of Britain's relationship with America as similar to that of a progenitor Greece to America's Rome.[25] Throughout the years, both have been active in North American, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries.

After the Second World War, no armed conflict emerged among major Western nations themselves, and no nuclear weapons were used in open conflict. The United Nations was also soon developed after World War II to help keep peaceful relations between nations and establishing the veto power for the permanent members of the UN Security Council, which included the United States.

In the second half of the 20th century, the USSR and US superpowers were engaged in the Cold War, which can be seen as a struggle between hegemonies for global dominance. After 1945, the United States enjoyed an advantageous position with respect to the rest of the industrialized world. In the Post–World War II economic expansion, the US was responsible for half of global industrial output, held 80 percent of the world's gold reserves, and was the world's sole nuclear power. The catastrophic destruction of life, infrastructure, and capital during the Second World War had exhausted the imperialism of the Old World, victor and vanquished alike. The largest economy in the world at the time, the United States recognized that it had come out of the war with its domestic infrastructure virtually unscathed and its military forces at unprecedented strength. Military officials recognized the fact that Pax Americana had been reliant on the effective United States air power, just as the instrument of Pax Britannica a century earlier was its sea power.[26] In addition, a unipolar moment was seen to have occurred following the collapse of the Soviet Union.[27]

The term Pax Americana was explicitly used by John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, who advocated against the idea, arguing that the Soviet bloc was composed of human beings with the same individual goals as Americans and that such a peace based on "American weapons of war" was undesirable:

I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.[28]

Beginning around the Vietnam War, the 'Pax Americana' term had started to be used by the critics of American Imperialism. Here in the late 20th century conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, the charge of Neocolonialism was often aimed at Western involvement in the affairs of the Third World and other developing nations.[29][30][31][32][33] NATO became regarded as a symbol of Pax Americana in West Europe:

The visible political symbol of the Pax Americana was NATO itself … The Supreme Allied Commander, always an American, was an appropriate title for the American proconsul whose reputation and influence outweighed those of European premiers, presidents, and chancellors.[34]

Currently, the Pax Americana is based on the military preponderance beyond challenge by any combination of powers and projection of power throughout the world's commons—neutral sea, air and space. This projection is coordinated by the Unified Command Plan which divides the world on regional branches controlled by a single command. Integrated with it are global network of military alliances (the Rio Pact, NATO, ANZUS and bilateral alliances with Japan and several other states) coordinated by Washington in a hub-and-spokes system and worldwide network of several hundreds of military bases and installations. Neither the Rio Treaty, nor NATO, for Robert J. Art, "was a regional collective security organization; rather both were regional imperia run and operated by the United States".[35] Former Security Advisor Zbignew Brzezinski drew an expressive summary of the military foundation of Pax Americana shortly after the unipolar moment:

In contrast [to the earlier empires], the scope and pervasiveness of American global power today are unique. Not only does the United States control all the world's oceans, its military legions are firmly perched on the western and eastern extremities of Eurasia ... American vassals and tributaries, some yearning to be embraced by even more formal ties to Washington, dot the entire Eurasian continent ... American global supremacy is ... buttered by an elaborate system of alliances and coalitions that literally span the globe.[36]

Besides the military foundation, there are significant non-military international institutions backed by American financing and diplomacy (like the United Nations and WTO). The United States invested heavily in programs such as the Marshall Plan and in the reconstruction of Japan, economically cementing defense ties that owed increasingly to the establishment of the Iron Curtain/Eastern Bloc and the widening of the Cold War.

Street art in Caracas, depicting Uncle Sam and accusing the American government of imperialism

Being in the best position to take advantage of free trade, culturally indisposed to traditional empires, and alarmed by the rise of communism in China and the detonation of the first Soviet atom bomb, the historically non-interventionist U.S. also took a keen interest in developing multilateral institutions which would maintain a favorable world order among them. The International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), part of the Bretton Woods system of international financial management was developed and, until the early 1970s, the existence of a fixed exchange rate to the US dollar. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was developed and consists of a protocol for normalization and reduction of trade tariffs.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the demise of the notion of a Pax Sovietica, and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. maintained significant contingents of armed forces in Europe and East Asia. The institutions behind the Pax Americana and the rise of the United States unipolar power have persisted into the early 21st century. The ability of the United States to act as "the world's policeman" has been constrained by its own citizens' historic aversion to foreign wars.[37] Though there has been calls for the continuation of military leadership, as stated in "Rebuilding America's Defenses":

The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable, and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself. [... What is required is] a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.[38]

This is reflected in the research of American exceptionalism, which shows that "there is some indication for [being a leader of an 'American peace'] among the [U.S.] public, but very little evidence of unilateral attitudes".[7] Resentments have arisen at a country's dependence on American military protection, due to disagreements with United States foreign policy or the presence of American military forces. In the post-communism world of the 21st-century, the French Socialist politician and former Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine describes the US as a hegemonic hyperpower, while the U.S. political scientists John Mearsheimer and Joseph Nye counter that the US is not a "true" hegemony, because it does not have the resources to impose a proper, formal, global rule; despite its political and military strength, the US is economically equal to Europe, thus, cannot rule the international stage.[39] Several other countries are either emerging or re-emerging as powers, such as China, Russia, India, and the European Union.

Joseph Nye discredited the United States as not a "true" hegemony in his 2002 article titled "The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians".[40] His book of the same year he opens: "Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others."[41] And his 1991 book he titled Bound to Lead.[42] Leadership, translated into Greek, renders hegemony; an alternative translation is archia – Greek common word for empire. Having defined the US hegemony as "not true", Nye looks for an analogy to the true empire: Decline, he writes, is not necessarily imminent. "Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the peak of its power ...[43]

In fact, there are striking parallels with the early Pax Romana (especially between 189 BC when the supremacy over the Mediterranean was won and the first annexation in 168 BC). Under that Pax Romana other states remained formally independent and very seldom were called "clients". The latter term became widely used only in the late medieval period. Usually, other states were called "friends and allies"—a popular expression under the Pax Americana.

One of the first to use the term Pax Americana was the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy. In 1942, the Committee envisaged that the United States may have to supplant the British Empire. Therefore, the United States "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana".[44] According to Swen Holdar, the founder of geopolitics Rudolf Kjellen (1864–1922) predicted the era of US global supremacy using the term Pax Americana shortly after World War I.[45] Writing in 1945, Ludwig Dehio remembered that the Germans used the term Pax Anglosaxonica in a sense of Pax Americana since 1918:

Now [1918] the [American colonial] cutting had grown into a tree that bade fair to overshadow the globe with its foliage. Amazed and shaken, we Germans began to discuss the possibility of a Pax Anglosaxonica as a world-wide counterpart to the Pax Romana. Suddenly the tendency toward global unification towered up, ready to gather the separate national states of Europe together under one banner and blanket in a larger cohesion ...[46]

The United States, Dehio associates on the same page, withdrew to isolation on that occasion. "Rome, too, had taken a long time to understand the significance of her world role." Two years earlier, with the war still at its peak, the founder of the Paneuropean Union, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, invoked the example of the two-centuries long "Pax Romana" which, he suggested, could be repeated if based on the preponderant US air power:

During the third century BC the Mediterranean world was divided on five great powers—Roma and Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt. The balance of power led to a series of wars until Rome emerged the queen of the Mediterranean and established an incomparable era of two centuries of peace and progress, the 'Pax Romana' ... It may be that America's air power could again assure our world, now much smaller than the Mediterranean at that period, two hundred years of peace ... This is the only realistic hope for a lasting peace.[47]

One of the first criticisms of "Pax Americana" was written by Nathaniel Peffer in 1943:

It is neither feasible nor desirable ... Pax Americana can be established and maintained only by force, only by means of a new, gigantic imperialism operating with the instrumentalities of militarism and the other concomitants of imperialism ... The way to dominion is through empire and the price of dominion is empire, and empire generates its own opposition.[48]

However, Peffer was not certain that this would not happen: "It is conceivable that ... America might drift into empire, imperceptibly, stage by stage, in a kind of power-politics gravitation." He also noted that America was heading precisely in that direction: "That there are certain stirrings in this direction is apparent, though how deep they go is unclear."[48]

The depth soon became clarified. Two later critics of Pax Americana, Michio Kaku and David Axelrod, interpreted the outcome of Pax Americana: "Gunboat diplomacy would be replaced by Atomic diplomacy. Pax Britannica would give way to Pax Americana." After the war, with the German and British militaries in tatters, only one force stood on the way to Pax Americana: the Soviet Army.[49] Four years after this criticism was written, the Red Army withdrew, paving the way for the unipolar moment. Joshua Muravchik commemorated the event by titling his 1991 article, "At Last, Pax Americana". He detailed:

Last but not least, the Gulf War marks the dawning of the Pax Americana. True, that term was used immediately after World War II. But it was a misnomer then because the Soviet empire—a real competitor with American power—was born at the same moment. The result was not a "pax" of any kind, but a cold war and a bipolar world ... During the past two years, however, Soviet power has imploded and a bipolar world has become unipolar.[50]

The following year, in 1992, a US strategic draft for the post-Cold War period was leaked to the press. The person responsible for the confusion, former Assistant Secretary of State, Paul Wolfowitz, confessed seven years later: "In 1992 a draft memo prepared by my office at the Pentagon ... leaked to the press and sparked a major controversy." The draft's strategy aimed "to prevent any hostile power from dominating" a Eurasian region "whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power". He added: "Senator Joseph Biden ridiculed the proposed strategy as 'literally a Pax Americana ... It won't work ...' Just seven years later, many of these same critics seem quite comfortable with the idea of a Pax Americana."[51]

The post-Cold War period, concluded William Wohlforth, much less ambiguously deserves to be called Pax Americana. "Calling the current period the true Pax Americana may offend some, but it reflects reality".[24]

The ‘’Pax Americana’’ motif reached its peak in the context of the 2003 Iraq War. The phrase "American Empire" appeared in one thousand news stories over a single six-month period in 2003.[52] Jonathan Freedland observed:

Of course, enemies of the United States have shaken their fist at its "imperialism" for decades ... What is more surprising, and much newer, is that the notion of an American empire has suddenly become a live debate inside the United States  Accelerated by the post-9/11 debate on America's role in the world, the idea of the United States as a 21st-century Rome is gaining a foothold in the country's consciousness.[53]

The New York Review of Books illustrated a recent piece on US might with a drawing of George Bush togged up as a Roman centurion, complete with shield and spears.[54] Bush's visits to Germany in 2002 and 2006 resulted in further Bush-as-Roman-emperor invective appearing in the German press. In 2006, freelance writer, political satirist, and correspondent for the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung, Arno Frank, compared the spectacle of the visit by Imperator Bush to "elaborate inspection tours of Roman emperors in important but not completely pacified provinces—such as Germania".[55] In September 2002, Boston's WBUR-FM radio station titled a special on US imperial power with the tag "Pax Americana".[56] "The Roman parallel, wrote Niall Ferguson in 2005,[57] is in danger of becoming something of a cliché." Policy analyst Vaclav Smil titled his 2010 book by what he intended to explain: Why America Is Not a New Rome.[58] The very phenomenon of the Roman-American association became the subject of research for Classicist Paul J. Burton.[59]

Peter Bender, in his 2003 article "America: The New Roman Empire",[60] summarized: "When politicians or professors are in need of a historical comparison in order to illustrate the United States' incredible might, they almost always think of the Roman Empire."[61] The article abounds with analogies:

In 1998, American political author, Charles A. Kupchan, described the world order "After Pax Americana"[67] and the next year "The Life after Pax Americana".[68] In 2003, he announced "The End of the American Era".[69] In 2012, however, he projected: "America's military strength will remain as central to global stability in the years ahead as it has been in the past."[70]

The Russian analyst Leonid Grinin argues that at present and in the nearest future Pax Americana will remain an effective tool of supporting the world order since the US concentrates too many leadership functions which no other country is able to take to the full extent. Thus, he warns that the destruction of Pax Americana will bring critical transformations of the World-system with unclear consequences [71]