The Empire Burden

When George Orwell was a young man in the 1920s, he served as a British policeman in the colony of Burma. On duty there he saw, as he put it, "the dirty work of empire at close quarters." He deplored the "white man's" oppression of the "native people" in "the East." But what Orwell found most disconcerting was the trap his own country had fallen into. "When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys," Orwell wrote a few years later in his essay "Shooting an Elephant." "In every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."

We may have moved beyond the paternalistic rhetoric of the early Orwell, but more recent jargon like "mission creep," coined during the Somalia debacle of the early 1990s, covers similar ground. In fact, the history of the past century should have proved conclusively that empires are traps, draining enormous resources and eventually enormous prestige from those who build them. Whether past imperialists saw their missions as conquerors and occupiers or liberators, peacekeepers and nation-builders, or all of the above, those Western countries that have claimed "a foothold in a foreign land," as the 19th-century naval strategist A. T. Mahan put it, have often found themselves serving interests that were no longer clearly their own.

The Obama administration is learning that lesson. It came to office a little more than four months ago committed to withdrawing from Iraq, and to stabilizing Afghanistan so it could get out of there, too. But we heard recently from U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey that plans have been drawn up in case American fighting forces have to remain in Iraq for another decade—and this despite a written agreement with Baghdad to pull all troops out by the end of 2011. Why? Not least because the Iraqis that the Americans helped put in power think they may need those forces to stay. Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi recently told a small group of reporters that he is "very concerned" about what will happen if the Americans leave. So, he suggested, the United States might well be asked to remain.

It's rare, in fact, that imperial powers decide on their own to give up any fragment of their foreign territories or influence. The British, for instance, "regarded long-term occupation as an inherent part of their 'civilizing mission'," the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson wrote in 2003. A self-described neo-imperialist, Ferguson supported the invasion of Iraq then taking place, but worried that the Americans wanted to get out too fast. "When the British intervened in a country like Iraq, they simply didn't have an exit strategy," Ferguson wrote. Their job would be done only when the country in question met their standards of civilization, the rule of law and free markets. "The only issue was whether to rule directly-—installing a British governor—or indirectly, with a British 'secretary' offering 'advice' to a local puppet," Ferguson noted. Presumably it was this latter case that some in the Bush administration envisioned for Iraq.

The question Orwell posed was about who really pulled the strings: the empire or its subjects. And there may come a time when neither side really knows. People in the colonies, territories and countries under tutelage reach a point where they cannot imagine how they would survive without the help of a faraway power—even if they resent its interference. And the erstwhile imperialists, once they've been forced out of their largest possessions, cannot imagine giving up even a small fraction more of territory or influence, no matter how much it costs them militarily, economically or politically.

As a result, vestiges of past empires can be found all over the globe. Back in 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launched a full-scale war to hold on to the windswept Falkland Islands, even though they are almost 13,000 kilometers away from England and only about 290 kilometers from the shores of Argentina. The little enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast remain parts of Spain and therefore of the European Union. So, would-be immigrants from deep in Africa regularly trek hundreds and even thousands of kilometers across the desert to try to storm the fences in hopes of asylum. Meanwhile, the United States itself continues to administer remnants of the imperial possessions it took in the Spanish--American War of 1898, including Guam, Puerto Rico and, yes, Cuba's Guantánamo Bay.

But it's the French who offer the most complicated and potentially the most instructive case study in past atrophy and future ambitions. The sun never sets on what Paris calls "the confetti of empire": from French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna in the South Pacific to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland. Indeed, France's longest land border is not with Germany or Spain, but, thanks to French Guiana, with Brazil. "It is all about extending our influence," a senior official at the French Foreign Ministry says bluntly, if privately.

But is it? Equitable treaties clearly make more sense if you can get them. In May French President Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated a new French military base in Abu Dhabi. Similar in purpose if not in scale to American installations in Qatar and Bahrain, farther up the coast, it is touted as a demonstration of France's changing approach to force projection. Camp Peace, as it is called (in a touch Orwell himself might have appreciated), is meant to demonstrate that France is willing to defend Abu Dhabi and to send that signal to Iran, less than 300 kilometers away. But more than a show of force, it's a show window for big-ticket French weapons systems that Paris would like to sell in the region. Unlike other French bases overseas, there is no history of French claims to sovereignty. Abu Dhabi wants to diversify its reliance on foreign defense forces. And—what is certainly the biggest break with the past—Abu Dhabi is footing the bill.