From The Post-American World (Fareed Zakaria, 2008) pp236-8
The United States will especially need to choose with regard to China. China is experiencing the largest, swiftest rise to world power of any country in history — larger and swifter even than that of the United States in the past. It will have to be given some substantial political and even military space commensurate with that power. At the same time, its rise should not become a cover for expansionism, aggression, or disruption. How to strike this balance — deterring China, on the one hand, accommodating its legitimate growth, on the other — is the central strategic challenge for American diplomacy. The United States can and should draw lines with China. But it should also recognize that it cannot draw lines everywhere. Unfortunately, the most significant hurdle the United States faces in shaping such a policy is a domestic political climate that tends to view any concessions and accommodations as appeasement.
To the extent that the United States can learn something from the experience of Great Britain, it is the need to make large strategic choices about where it will focus its energies and attention. Britain did so wisely when it faced the rise of the United States. It was less wise about its own empire. In the early twentieth century, London confronted a dilemma much like Washington’s today. When a crisis broke somewhere, no matter how remote, the world would look to London and ask, “What will you do about this?” Britain’s strategic blunder was to spend decades — time and money, energy and attention — on vain attempts to stabilize peripheral places on the map. For example, Britain should have expended less effort organising the constitutional arrangements of Dutch farmers in the Transvaal — and thus fighting the Boer War, which broke the back of the empire — and more facing up to its declining productivity and the rise of Germany in the center of Europe.
British elites pored over Roman histories in part because of their fascination with a previous great empire, but also because they were looking for lessons in managing vast swaths of land on different continents. There was a demand, as it were, for people skilled in language, history, and imperial administration. This, however, ended up trumping the need to develop the engineers of the future. Britain’s power and reach also made it intoxicated with a sense of historic destiny, a trend fueled by a Protestant revival. The historian Correlli Barnett wrote (in the 1970s) that a “moral revolution” gripped England in the mid—nineteenth century, moving it away from the practical and reason-based society that had brought about the industrial revolution and toward one dominated by religious evangelicalism, excessive moralism, and romanticism.“
The United States could easily fall into a similar imperial trap. Every crisis around the world demands its attention and action. American tentacles and interests are spread as widely today as were Britain’s at the height of its empire. For those who believe that America’s place in the world is wholly different from that of the British Empire, it is instructive to read the ”Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2006. In it, the Department of Defense boasts of being “one of the world’s largest ‘landlords’ with a physical plant consisting of more than 571,200 facilities (buildings, structures, and utilities) located on more than 3,700 sites, on nearly 30 million acres.” The report lists a sprawling network of 766 bases in forty foreign countries, from Antigua to the United Kingdom. These overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion in 2005, housed 197,000 uniform personnel and an equal number of dependents and civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,000 local foreign hires. They covered 687,000 acres (nearly 1,100 square miles) of foreign land and cost taxpayers $13 billion in maintenance alone.
America may be more powerful than Britain was, but it still cannot neglect the lesson that it must make choices. It cannot be involved in everything. Tensions in the Middle East are important, but they have sucked all the resources, energy, and attention out of every other issue in American foreign policy for the last seven years. Washington has to move out of the eighth century A.D., adjudicating claims between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad, and move into the twenty-first century — to China, India, Brazil — where the future is being made. Every choice to engage in some cause, worthy as it is, is a distraction from the larger strategic issues that confront the United States. In focusing on the seemingly urgent, we will forget the truly important.
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