How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

To the degree that we live in a world of pocket-size personal devices rather than one of large screens and subwoofers, we have Sony to thank. Or blame.

Standards work in a funny way. The firms or countries whose standards prevail sprint ahead while their competitors retool or learn the new system. Economists call it a “first-mover advantage.” But that advantage subsides with time. Once everyone uses 60-degree screw threads, there’s no benefit to having been the first one to have used them (though there may be other rewards for having gotten ahead of the learning curve). The longer the race, the less meaningful a head start is.

Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.

Desperate business leaders tried to unlock the secret of Japan’s success. NBC ran a documentary called If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? that profiled W. Edwards Deming. Finally, after decades of semi-obscurity, Deming could command the fame in his own country that he’d enjoyed in Japan. “I’m proud to call myself a disciple of Dr. Deming,” Ford’s CEO declared.

Yet while an urge to emulate Japan seized executive suites, despair reigned on the shop floor. You could hear it in the music. The bubbly tunes of Buddy Holly had given way to gloomier fare. “Born down in a dead man’s town” was how Bruce Springsteen, the bard of deindustrialization, began his grim assessment of the national prospects in the song “Born in the U.S.A.” Five years later, Sony bought Columbia Records, Springsteen’s label. “Born in the U.S.A.” was now the property of Japan.

The author Michael Crichton took Japan-bashing further with his 1992 novel Rising Sun, a thriller about sinister, sexually perverse Japanese businessmen, one of whom murders a white woman. The film, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, opened to protests by Asian Americans, who worried that it would incite violence.

“The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden reflected. And if one superpower could collapse easily, why not another?

“We had to avoid giving the impression that western ‘colonialists’ had unilaterally imposed their will,” explained Schwarzkopf. To that end, he convened a regular “Arab reaction seminar” to assess how locals might perceive the military’s actions. Yet no amount of precaution could change the basic fact that one country was stationing its troops in another’s land. It’s not hard to imagine how the people of the United States would have reacted to a Saudi base in, say, Texas.

The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials. Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths—Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands”—in one of the world’s poorest countries.

his chief objection, voiced consistently throughout his career, was the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia. This is worth emphasizing. After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.

In a way, Bin Laden got lucky with George W. Bush, who had recently succeeded Bill Clinton. Bush could have treated the 9/11 attacks as a crime, arrested the perpetrators, and brought them to justice. Instead, he declared a “war on terror” of global expanse and promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”

“We need to create a colonial office—fast,” wrote Max Boot, a conservative critic of the administration. The British historian Niall Ferguson agreed. The United States had proved to be “a surprisingly inept empire builder” and should take a page from Britain’s history.

“It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,” Cheney explained. In practice, this meant indefinitely detaining and forcefully interrogating suspected terrorists. Laws prohibited this—both international treaties outlawing torture and constitutional guarantees of the right of due process. Yet as the Bush administration discovered, those laws didn’t hold with the same force everywhere. The United States by law couldn’t torture. But it could transfer suspects to its allies for interrogation, even allies known for their loose adherence to international conventions.

Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.

But McCain had his own empire problems. The son of a naval officer, McCain had been born not on the mainland, but in the Panama Canal Zone. He hadn’t lived there long, but his birthplace nevertheless raised questions. There’d never been a president born in a territory. Was McCain even eligible for the office?

In the 1930s, Congress addressed this issue. As a House report put it, “the citizenship of persons born in the Canal Zone of American parents, has never been defined either by the Constitution, treaty or congressional enactment.” After debate, Congress passed a statute making them citizens. It applied not only to future children but, retroactively, to anyone who’d been born in the Canal Zone to a citizen parent in the past. The law passed in 1937. John McCain was born in 1936. Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency. As Gabriel Chin, the law professor who unearthed this, put it, McCain was born “eleven months and a hundred yards short of citizenship.”

does all this mean the United States can be classified as an empire? That term is most often used as a pejorative, as an unfavorable character assessment. Empires are the bullies that bat weaker nations around. It’s not hard to argue that the United States is imperialist in that sense. Certainly its corporations and armed forces have spread themselves out comfortably all over the world. Yet empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape. And by this definition, the United States has indisputably been an empire and remains one today. Oddly, though the United States is frequently accused of imperialism, its territorial dimensions go largely unnoticed. So much energy has gone into presenting the United States via the logo map that even its critics, the ones most eager to cry empire, have little to say about overseas territory. Still, if there is one thing the history of the Greater United States tells us, it’s that such territory matters. And not only for the people who live in colonies or near bases. It matters for the whole country. World War II began, for the United States, in the territories. The war on terror started with a military base. The birth control pill, chemotherapy, plastic, Godzilla, the Beatles, Little House on the Prairie, Iran-Contra, the transistor radio, the name America itself—you can’t understand the histori...