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The two parts of this book, ‘Imperium’ and ‘Consilium’, offer an account of the American imperial system that reaches across the world today. It is reasonable to ask what particular contribution they could make to a subject that has attracted a large existing literature, composed essentially of diplomatic history and geopolitical strategy. The scope of ‘Imperium’ differs from much of the former in three ways, temporal, spatial and political. The first is a question of chronological span. An extensive body of research, much of it of the highest quality, exists on American foreign policy. But it characteristically divides into widely separate bodies of historical writing—principally, studies of US territorial and overseas expansion in the nineteenth century; analyses of US conduct in the struggle against the USSR during the Cold War; and discussions of US power projection since the last decade of the twentieth century. What is attempted here, by contrast, is a connected understanding of the dynamics of American strategy and diplomacy in a single arc from the war on Mexico to the war on Terror. The second difference is a question of geographical attention. Coverage of the exercise of US imperial power has tended to focus either on its operations in what was once the Third World of former colonial lands, or on its battle with what was once the Second World of communist states. There has on the whole been less concern with the objectives pursued by Washington within the First World of advanced capitalism itself. Here an effort is made to keep all three fronts of US expansion concurrently in focus.

Finally, there is a political difference. Much of the literature on American imperial power is critical of it, often—though, as I will note, by no means invariably—written from standpoints that can be regarded as broadly of the left, as distinct from mainstream celebrations of the role of the United States in the world, which tend to come from the centre or right of the ideological spectrum. A common characteristic of this writing on the left is not only criticism of the global hegemony of the United States, but confidence that it is in steepening decline, if not terminal crisis. Radical opposition to the American empire, however, does not require reassurance of its impending collapse or retreat. The changing balance of forces at whose centre its hegemony continues to lie must be reckoned objectively, without wishful thinking. How far much of the American elite itself is from any such sober stocktaking forms the subject of the second part of this book, ‘Consilium’, which looks at the current thinking of its strategists. This forms a system of discourse about which relatively little has been written. The survey of it here offers a first synoptic account. To this I have added, in an annexe, an earlier consideration of one of the best known of all its contemporary minds.

I owe composition of ‘Imperium’ and ‘Consilium’ to a year at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, finishing the last in October 2013; they first appeared in New Left Review in the following month. In the time that has elapsed since, the international scene has been dominated by a number of developments, in the extended Middle East, the former Soviet Union and the Far East, that have renewed debate about the condition of American power. A brief postscript considers these and their upshots, still ongoing.

Perry AndersonOctober 2014