Not since the 1930s and early 1940s have we seen so many malevolent empires on the rise.
Empires can rise and fall quickly. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires abruptly collapsed amid military defeat, rising nationalism, and revolution.
Yet on the eve of World War II four new empires suddenly grew out the wreckage of old Europe and Asia. A weak Italy under Fascist Benito Mussolini in just a few years grabbed much of East and North Africa, as well as the Dalmatian coast. Hitler’s so-called “Third Empire” carved off Austria and strips of Eastern Europe — and planned to go to war for more. The Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states and southern Finland. Japan declared first Manchuria, and then Southeast Asia, part of its new “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
But by the war’s end in 1945, the Japanese and Italian empires had collapsed. So did the Third Reich — and soon the British Empire as well. The Soviet implosion in 1991 was expected by very few.
We are now in an equally turbulent age of rising empires — mostly due to a new American indifference and passivity. Or, to put it more exactly, President Obama believes that his own legacy rests with avoiding all confrontations overseas, withdrawing as many troops as he can, and cutting the defense budget as much as Congress will allow so as to use the funds to address supposed inequality at home. If chaos results abroad, he can either blame his predecessor, George W. Bush, or assume that his successor will have to deal with what he wrought — or both. Obama is running out the clock of his presidency on the premise of Après moi, le déluge.
The Iranian theocracy fancies itself the reincarnation of the ancient Persian Empire of Cyrus and Xerxes. A soon-to-be nuclear Iran, through its operatives, now controls portions of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and, soon, Yemen — and dreams of overturning the Sunni sheikhdoms in the Gulf. If you assert that administration talking points come right out of Tehran — as Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey recently did — Obama will characterize such objections not as principled differences, but as cynical attempts to please “donors” — a veiled reference to rich Jews whose money, Obama apparently believes, distorts policy. I think the administration’s policy toward the new Iranian Empire is something like, “They probably won’t get the bomb until 2017.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin has added parts of Ukraine to his earlier land conquests in Georgia and Crimea. He dreams of updating 19th-century Czarist Russia. Putin’s next target will probably be half of Estonia, a NATO country, whose implosion would render the postwar alliance null and void. Putin is dangerous not just because he runs an autocratic nuclear state and has dreams of restoring 19th-century imperial Russia under Orthodoxy and a new czardom, but also because he has developed a perverse delight in gratuitously humiliating Barack Obama, by exposing his sermonizing platitudes as both hypocritical and impotent.
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan dreams of reviving the Ottoman Empire. He flexes Turkey’s new muscles in both the Arab and the Mediterranean worlds, as he slowly strangles Turkish democracy. Erdogan’s foreign policy is based on a pathological hatred of Israel and claims of a special multicultural relationship with Barack Obama. Erdogan certainly rejects the secularized vision of the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and he seems to wish to see pro-Western Arab dictatorships replaced by more revolutionary Islamist governments that will look to Turkey for spiritual guidance.
The new terrorist Islamic State has grandiose schemes of recreating the medieval pan-Arab caliphate. After carving off much of Syria and Iraq for their new theocracy, the jihadists plan to topple the rich Gulf sheikhdoms and grab the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Islamic State grew out of two laxities. First, no Western power tried to organize a non-Islamist alternative to the bloody pro-Iranian, pro-Hezbollah Syrian dictatorship of Bashar Assad, which was on the verge of falling during the Arab Spring four years ago; instead, Western nations may well have ended up arming and abetting ISIS thugs. Second, for the price of a cheap 2012 reelection talking point, the U.S. fled from Iraq in 2011, after enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure had achieved, in the words of Barack Obama, a relatively stable and secure Iraq that might have been, in the words of Joe Biden, the administration’s greatest achievement. Supporters of Obama claim the Iraq War created ISIS; in fact, the disintegration of Syria and the abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Iraq did.
China has terrified almost all of its Westernized neighbors — Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is trying to recreate its own version of the imperial Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere through cash, mercantilism, threats, and the overstepping of borders. Its defense build-up and new aggressive foreign policy reflect a hunch that America’s old Pacific and Asian allies are no longer securely beneath the American defensive umbrella, that they recognize their vulnerability, and that Chinese money and threats are more relevant than U.S. platitudes and indifference.
There are several common denominators to the grandiose visions of these five would-be empires. All are anti-democratic. They are certainly anti-American. They are bullies who pick fights only with entities deemed smaller and weaker than themselves. And they have all been empowered by the recessional of the lead-from-behind United States from the world stage. In other words, they believe their aggrandizement is either ignored by an Obama administration that feels deterring them is too costly and unpopular, or tactically condoned as the inherent right of countries to adjudicate politics in their own spheres of influence, without an intrusive American global cop sticking its post-colonial, imperialist nose where it has no business.
There used to be a dominant American-led West that sought to encourage abroad constitutional government, market capitalism, and human rights. The so-called New World Order that followed the Cold War was backed by U.S. economic muscle, an overpowering military, and advocacy for freedom. America showed a fierce loyalty to its longtime friends in Europe and the Middle East and no tolerance for outlaws like Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and the Iranian theocracy. It had a special concern for the proverbial small and vulnerable countries and peoples such as Israel, the Kurds, Taiwan, and Greece. Now, Iran, Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State, and China have taken note that this is no longer the case.
Obama is abetting five new empires that believe their reactionary autocracy, anti-Americanism, and growing military power should earn them greater material rewards and global influence. To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus, where Obama has helped to create chaos, he calls it peace.
We are witnessing empire-building unlike anything seen since the 1930s and early 1940s. What is different this time around is not just the older themes of American isolationism, indifference, and appeasement, but also a new, bizarre twist. The Obama administration feels almost as if these rising suzerainties have a more legitimate right to carve out regional empires than the United States has to stop them.
A frightening world we are now in.
I fully second Professor Hanson.
P.S: USA’s continuous coddling of Gulf monarchies is abhorring. I find the ‘grief’ that has been exhibited by Western democracies on the death of an absolute monarch who used to sodomize his people as purely disgusting.
Obama hates colonialism, if it’s that type that advances American values, which he, like his pastor Jeremiah Wright, cannot appreciate and thinks are stuck in 1789.
Turkish Islamic colonialism, well, that’s okay with him. Russian “re”colonialism gets a pass. ISIS colonialism he probably fears, but not enough to commit troops. Chinese colonialism he can’t even see, apparently, at least until we and they get Climate Change under control. What a joke.
What a disaster of a president. I can’t wait for him to be out of office. Hell, even Hillary would have made a better president, and I can’t believe I’m saying that. That’s not to say she ought to be the next one. God knows that Obama and Hillary share a Progressive world-view. That’s a goodly part of the Progressive problem. The utopian, pie-in-the-sky notion that all people are good, that all cultures are morally equivalent, that bureaucrats and regulators know more than you do about what’s good for you, and that we can kumbayah our way to problem solving with international bullies.
Please forgive the new verb, kumbaya. I kumbayah, Yesterday I kumbayahed. Tomorrow I will go kubayahing.
Obama is the most incompetent american president in my Life time.
And worst,, he will make millions in lecture as an ex president.
Il n´y a pas de justice.
I have done a lot of research on this subject and I truly believe that President Obama is Islamic. I believe that those in the Middle East also believes him Islamic do to the simple and traditional rule that if the father was Islamic, the son is automatically Islamic. See what Jeremiah Wright says about making it comfortable for Obama to move into Christianity. (I think he was never asked to renounce Islam)
Once you View the president as being of the Islamic religion, suddenly all of his actions make sense. Question whether his family would be in jeopardy if he made any moves against a popular Islamic Jihad.
Don’t forget, Obama’s chief advisor is the Iranian born, Valerie Jarrett.
Empires of sand? Empires of Pyrrich Victory? Dueling Empires of Emperor Palpatine?
Perhaps: Progtard Empires of Empathy for the cost of bullets to execute Christians and Hebrews?
To which empires do you refer, professor Hanson?
Finally, something I can disagree with!
I think the inclusion of Russia is not good. The situation with Russia is not at all as clear as with the other 4 budding empires, and consequently it makes the whole argument look shaky, and thus like a red rag to a bull to the already delusional Leftists.
China is making actual land grabs off the coast of its neighbours, Vietnam and Philippines, not to mention threatening Japan. That is pretty clear.
Iran has been the villain of the piece in the Middle East for longer than I can remember. From helping insurgents make IEDs to kill marines in their armoured vehicles, to supporting all manner of terrorist groups.
Turkey, NATO member bizarrely, has no intention of returning the half of Cyprus it annexed, and is content to support ships that invade Israel’s territorial waters. It was also happy to protect ISIS from Kurdish fighters. With more journalists imprisoned than any other country, its pretty clear which road they are taking.
The Islamic State is a no-brainer.
But for Russia, all you have is Crimea, plus a lot of hypothetical future actions. The Crimea case is not black and white, but this isn’t the place to go into that, although I am convinced a diplomatic solution was possible earlier on, which would have avoided all the past and now ongoing, bloodshed. Certainly, the actions of the EU and the US only stoked the flames of the fire, and Putin has about as much intention to be shown to be a pussy cat, as Obama has of being shown to be anally retentive or not cool. Where are all the other signs? Has Russia downed a US spy plane, held the crew, then ransomed off the plane? Has Russia grabbed parts of Alaska? Or seized any Japanese islands recently? Has Russia tried to encircle the US with early warning stations, so it can cut the strategic advantage of their missiles by a vital number of minutes (and Kennedy’s Cuba is history BTW)? You could point in desperation to Russia’s new nuclear subs, but what do you expect them to do with all their noisy old subs, re-float the Kursk?
Instead of always casting Russia as the enemy and pushing it towards China, we should be looking at how many of our interests lie in common, and trying to understand the problems they face, and how they, from their starting point, have to deal with them, at this point in their history. The fundamental nature of our societies is not totally different from that of Russia; whereas Iran is a polar opposite, and a serious threat.
To include Russia is what’s called to “over egg the pudding”.
Not only empires arising, but the resurrections of centuries worth of their mutual antagonisms and aggressions, old wars, old scores to settle over old wounds, rabidly disparate philosophies clashing. With no referee, what mighty confrontations lurk in the near future?
Empires rise & empires fall. That is the only real lesson from history.
Can America stop the ebb and flow of history, acting as some kind of benevolent world cop on the beat? I don’t know, but I doubt it. I do know that the Athenians tried to do something like that in their little backwater of the Eastern Mediterrean and look where it got them!
Further, there is a deep strain within the American pysche (perhaps it’s an after-shock of the Vietman War) to the effect that it is pointless to interfere in someone else’s fight. The Democrats have been appealing to that sentiment for years and it has been very productive for them. Obama may be more foolish than most, but he is simply following a tactic which has been very successful in the past.
And let’s look at this in its broader context: For decades, the American taxpayers braved tremendous dangers and made enormous sacrifices so as to stand up to the communists. When the Cold War ended, the Amercian taxpayers would have been well within their rights to think that, now that the job was done, they could return to some kind of normalcy, to go about their everyday business, without having to interfere in every hell-hole around the world, (Wasn’t that what President Bush Sr meant when he declared a “new world order”?)
But it didn’t work out that way, did it? Seemingly, every year, the American taxpayers have been called upon to bear even more burdens and pay even more prices (paraphrasing the second worst President in living memory) to try to stop people around the world doing stupid things. So, against that background, it is not surprising that, at some point, the average Joe will say: “enough is enough”.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Empires will rise and empires will fall.
Naturally, if some development around the world threatens American security or important commercial interests, then it makes sense to stand up to be counted. And, above all else, remember that the world is a dangerous place; to quote the Romans, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”.
Once again, Dr. Hanson, I think you’re correct…I’ve wondered about Iran and how they must fantasize about being the new Persia. It’s a nightmare how stupid and ignorant, and short-sighted Americans, and Euros have become. I fear the world will pay a big price for its cowardice.
The removal of US troops from Iraq swelled the ranks of ISIS all but debunking American troops causing the creation of more terrorists. Reacting to terrorism will cause many to fill the ranks of those who have fallen but so goes all conflicts. If we are going to fight Islamist s we should expect counter punches and not whip ourselves over such responses. Now we clearly see running away and giving Islamists what they want makes things much worse than confronting them and destroying their sanctuaries.
The removal of all troops from Iraq will go down as one of the most devastating decisions of the new century.
very well said. the world is on fire ready to explode with radical jihad and Obama lit the fuse