America has become an empire. Everyone says so.
This is a surprise to most Americans, since few imagined that they were building such a thing. But, as historians such as Walter Nugent and Robert Kagan have recently taught us, Americans have been at this imperialist expansionism for quite some time — really since the beginning of the republic. How else to explain that the United States has gone from a handful of agrarian colonies to a world-spanning colossus in the space of only a few centuries? As you read this, American military might is deployed across the planet. The U.S. Navy is literally larger than all of the other navies in the world combined. The United States military accounts for almost one-half of total global military expenditures. Never before in human history has there been such a disparity in power among sovereign states.
So, I have a question. If America is an empire (and everyone says that it is), then why is gas so expensive? I’m serious. One of the principle advantages of empire is the conquest and confiscation of other people’s property. Choose almost any historical empire and you will find just that standard operating procedure. From the Hittites to the Assyrians, from the Arabs to the Turks, from the Mongols to the Mamluks, from the French to the Germans — they all worked the same way. These empires built large military forces and proceeded to conquer their neighbors. They then used the resources of the vanquished to support further conquests, and continued to do so until satisfied, stopped, or defeated. A simple formula, it has been followed by multitudes of conquerors across history.
Now back to my question. Like any empire, the United States is powerful and pretty adept at conquest. In 2003 it conquered oil-rich Iraq. Critics of the war claimed that the Bush Administration lied about WMDs in Iraq so as to get their hands on the petro-wealth of the country. Chants of “No Blood for Oil” rang across American college campuses (or at least among the faculty members anyway). So, where is the oil? Iraq currently produces about 2.5 million barrels per day (down from around 6 million before the war). Americans buy that oil from the Iraqis on the open market. If the war was all about grabbing oil, then why don’t we own it? After all, Iraq was conquered fair and square. Why doesn’t the country belong to the conquerors?
If you find these questions appalling or just foolish, that’s good. So do I. But it is worth remembering that our reaction is unusual, at least from the perspective of history. If past empire builders such as Alexander the Great, Mehmed II, or Adolf Hitler had conquered Iraq you can be sure that it would belong to them. Enemies would be liquidated and the riches of the land would be extracted. Even the British Empire — no hard-knuckled empire of conquest — would have (and did) set up a colonial government in Iraq directly under the control of London.
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