In her war with Iraq, America has acted much like imperial Britain more than a century ago, when in a very different world she invaded the Sudan, killed the Dervish leader at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman, and, thanks to quick-firing artillery and machine guns, slaughtered 11,000 of his ill-armed followers on the field. This is, therefore, an appropriate moment to compare the United States as the imperial power today to Britain as an empire passed.

During the mercantilist 18th century, trade and territorial conquest advanced together, first at the expense of Holland and then of France. This dual process was exemplified by The Honorable East India Company, which, though a commercial enterprise, also ruled the British dominion in India. By the time of the American Revolution, there had evolved an Atlantic protectionist “common market” under the Union Flag, with complementary flows of commodities between the North American colonies, the West Indian sugar islands, and the Mother Country. The profits from this British Empire paid for the Royal Navy, which in turn promoted and protected the Empire’s expansion.

All this changed in the Victorian era when Britain adopted free trade in place of mercantilism, and markets under the Flag lost their old pre-eminence. At the same time, evangelical religion created a new imperial ruling class who believed it their duty to civilize the native races, especially in India, “the jewel in the Crown” of Empire. The poisonous first fruit of this attempt to impose Western values was the so-called Indian Mutiny in 1857, a violent uprising of the Indian army against its British officers and British rule as a whole, which was crushed by British troops with equal violence. Meanwhile, thanks to the Royal Navy’s then mastery of the seas, British settlements had been planted in Australia and New Zealand, more than 10,000 miles from the homeland.

By the 1860s, free-trade Britain enjoyed an apparently permanent hegemony over world commerce and finance. But only two decades later this dominance came under threat from the rise of new continental-scale rivals like America and the German Empire. The response in Britain was to revive the concept of the British Empire. It was argued that in order to remain a pre-eminent world power, Britain must weld her historic rummage-bag of possessions—but especially the English-speaking colonies like Australia and New Zealand—into a single strategic and economic entity masterminded from London.

But this vision of a new oceanic superpower proved impossible to realize. The colonists overseas were swiftly growing into nations in themselves, increasingly jealous of their independence. By the Statute of Westminster in 1930, the Dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand became fully independent nations whose only formal link with Britain and each other was a monarchy in common.

By this time too, the attempt to create a common market had failed. There was little correlation between the global pattern of British markets and investments, and the “red on the map.” In 1938, for instance, India, Britain’s grandest imperial possession, took less than eight percent of British exports.

Yet the myth of Empire had seized British minds. Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 marked the beginning of a public-relations empire, and even the British elite swallowed the fantasy. Through the 1920s and 30s there was much mention of The Empire in political discourse; every Christmas the King spoke to it on the wireless. In this way the British convinced themselves that the existence of the commonwealth made Britain a first-class world power. Yet the truth was that by the 1930s the Empire had become a net drain on British strength—one of the most remarkable examples of strategic overextension in history.

Britain herself, an island state of only 45 million people, provided the bulk of the Empire’s industrial resources and of its naval and military strength. As the Mother Country, Britain also accepted a moral obligation to defend the Empire in its global sprawl, while the Dominions accepted no reciprocal obligation towards Britain’s security in Europe. Even in the face of dictators Britain found it impossible to persuade the Dominions to agree on common foreign and defense policies, let alone joint military contingency plans. There never was an imperial NATO. Moreover, the ruling elite’s sense of responsibility for the non-European peoples of the Empire caused Britain to cling on in places like India even though it was no longer an economic asset and garrisoning it in peacetime swallowed up a third of the British army.

The emergence by 1937 of a triple menace from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militaristic Japan, presented Britain with an insoluble dilemma. She neither possessed, nor could afford to create, armed forces strong enough to parry this threat. Nor, for that matter, could her now obsolescent industrial base produce the armaments. When Britain began to re-arm in 1936, she had to import large quantities of machine tools and military kit from abroad, mostly Europe and America. By 1938-39, these imports were fast running her towards a balance-of-payments crisis.

In spring 1939, the British Chiefs of Staff warned that Britain could only hope to win a long war, while the Treasury warned that she could only afford a short war. Even if outright defeat could be averted, ruin was inevitable, and thus it proved in World War II. From April 1941 onwards, Britain depended for her war effort and indeed for national life itself on American subsidies under Lend-Lease. Then, in 1941–42, the façade of Empire collapsed when the British colonies in southeast Asia fell to the Japanese, and Australia and New Zealand passed under American protection. Nemesis had at last overtaken a strategy flawed by the coupling of imperial self-delusion with imperial overstretch.

The power of the American onslaught on Iraq might seem to demonstrate that the United States could never become similarly overextended. Certainly, there is little in common between Britain and the U.S. in their development as imperial powers. By the time of World War I, the United States had developed into a self-contained economy of unrivaled scale and power, the very opposite of Britain’s island economy meshed into world markets. And whereas the Royal Navy had always been an inherent necessity to Britain’s vast oceanic trade, the American battle fleet constructed after 1900 was—as Churchill said of the German High Seas Fleet at the same time—a “luxury fleet,” developed purely in order to project American power in pursuit of Teddy Roosevelt’s vision of America’s Manifest Destiny.

Thus while Britain acquired an empire piecemeal largely as the by-product of a hunt for markets, the overseas expansion of the U.S. began as a project of national ambition. Her colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were of minor economic value to her continental economy, while being strategically irrelevant to her continental security.

It was that Methodist academic of a president, Woodrow Wilson, who during World War I gave an extraordinary twist to the notion of Manifest Destiny by proclaiming that America must now create and uphold a new world order based on American values. The Fourteen Points were inspired not by calculation of America’s strategic or economic interests, but by the ideology of Christian righteousness. This was, after all, the belief that had taken the Pilgrim Fathers to New England in 1620, which their descendents took with them to the Midwest and beyond, and which today shapes the worldview of George W. Bush’s Washington.

Between the world wars, America’s Manifest Destiny—whether of Woodrow Wilson’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s brand—was temporarily eclipsed by non-interventionism as advocated by the Founding Fathers. Yet, willy-nilly, the American Empire in the Pacific rendered continental isolationism no longer possible. With Old Glory flying in the Philippines less than 400 miles from the Chinese mainland, the United States was brought face to face with militaristic Japan by that country’s invasion of China. For moral rather than strategic reasons Franklin Roosevelt took China’s side, at first politically and then in 1941 by imposing an economic embargo on Japan. This led in turn to the pre-emptive Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor that pitchforked America into the Second World War. Victory in 1945 over Germany and Japan brought the United States into direct confrontation with the Soviet Empire, especially in Europe. Here were ultimate consequences of Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist annexations that he could hardly have foreseen. Yet victory also bestowed on America the economic and strategic hegemony over the whole Western world (now including a Japan ruled by an American viceroy).

America was the only belligerent to emerge from the war not ruined but actually richer and industrially stronger. The firm base of American hegemony therefore lay in an economy of overwhelming size and productivity. To exercise effective imperial control, however, demands institutional mechanisms, and these the United States proceeded to set up: in the economic sphere, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and the Marshall Plan; in the financial sphere, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates pegged to the dollar. The unprecedented and continuing status of the dollar as an international reserve currency has meant that America could keep running enormous budget and balance-of-payments deficits—as she still does.

In the politico-strategic sphere, the United States was the dominant founding member of the United Nations in 1945. She believed that a consensus among the great powers on the UN Security Council (along with America’s then monopoly of the atom bomb) would provide security on the cheap, though the slide into the Cold War with the Soviet Union doomed this notion. Instead, by the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 and the creation of NATO in 1950, the United States committed herself to the long-term defense of Europe.

When President Truman launched the United States into the Korean War in 1950, it marked a fateful first step along the road of far-off military interventions reminiscent of Britain’s Victorian imperial wars. Yet the British experience offers no parallel to the sheer extent of American strategic involvement around the world by the 1960s in pursuit of containment of the Soviet Union. Alliances and mutual security pacts committed the U.S. to the protection of countries in almost every continent at enormous cost in a global spread of garrisons, air bases, and carrier fleets.

In 1965, came the most fateful imperial foray of all, when President Lyndon Johnson launched American forces into the Vietnam War. Why did he do it? Vietnam had no oil fields, industries, or key raw materials—only rice fields. The answer lies in America’s central motivation in waging the Cold War: ideological hatred of Communism. With rare exceptions (George Kennan, Henry Kissinger), American policy-makers did not regard the Soviet Union as simply a rival power bloc, but as an evil empire threatening the free world. Such righteousness justified the global commitments and military adventure. British imperial rulers in their time had been far more pragmatic.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1990 might seem to have proved America’s cold warriors right. Yet this victory only replaced a stable bipolar world with one highly confused and unstable. In consequence, American imperial involvement has expanded: in Europe with military interventions and now standing garrisons in Bosnia and Kosovo; in the Middle East with the Gulf War and its legacy of military presence on Arab soil in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere that has inflamed the Islamic hatred so cunningly exploited by Osama bin Laden.

This Islamic venom, focused through al-Qaeda, provoked Washington to proclaim a new ideological world conflict—a war on terrorism. Thus began a further stage in American imperial expansion: the conquest of Afghanistan; commitment of special forces in Aden, Somalia, the Philippines, and Indonesia; and now the occupation of Iraq, a target more easily identified and demolished by America’s military machine than the elusive al-Qaeda network. Beyond Iraq loom other members of “the axis of evil” who may soon become objects of the new doctrine of pre-emptive attack. Does this mean the United States is nearing that breakpoint of empires gone before: overstretch to the point that the national economy cracks under the weight of the imperial role?

Already $75 billion has been budgeted for the Iraq war and collateral purposes. The price tag on postwar reconstruction has been put at some $50 billion. Five years of military occupation will cost another $43 billion. To these costs add an annual defense budget of $380 billion. This enormous extra load is being incurred at the time when the American economy is faltering amid fears of a global recession. There is deep unease as to whether America can continue to run a huge budget deficit atop a massive trade deficit. Are we looking at a super-Enron, supremely powerful but about to implode? The graveyard of empires suggests as much. 
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