The post-imperial moment.

• Author: Kaplan, Robert D.
• Position: Essay

In 1935, the anti-Nazi writer and Austrian-Jewish intellectual Joseph Roth published a story, "The Bust of the Emperor," about an elderly count at the chaotic fringe of the former Habsburg Empire who refused to think of himself as a Pole or an Italian, even though his ancestry encompassed both. In his mind, the only mark of "true nobility" was to be "a man above nationality," in the Habsburg tradition. "My old home, the Monarchy, alone," the count says, "was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men." Indeed, the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, Roth wrote presciently, had as their backdrop the collapse of empires and the rise of uniethnic states, with Fascist and Communist leaders replacing the power of traditional monarchs.

Empire had its evils, as Roth himself details in another great work, The Radetzky March, but one cannot deny empire's historical function--to provide stability and order to vast tracts of land occupied by different peoples, particularly in Europe. If not empire, what then? In fact, as Michael Lind has intuited, the underpinnings of the global order today attempt to replace the functions of empire--from the rules-based international system to the raft of supranational and multinational groupings, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the International Court of Justice and the World Economic Forum. Silently undergirding this process since World War II has been the undeniable fact of American power--military, diplomatic and economic--protecting sea lanes, maritime choke points, access to hydrocarbons and, in general, providing some measure of security to the world. These tasks are amoral to the extent that they do not involve lofty principles, but without them there is no possibility for moral action anywhere. This is not traditional imperialism, which is no longer an option, but it is a far more humane replacement for it.

While the United States still remains the single strongest power on earth, it is less and less an overwhelming one. The diffusion of central authority in new democracies everywhere, the spread of chaos in the Middle East and North Africa, and the rise of Russia, China and Iran as regional hegemons--all work to constrain the projection of American power. This is part of a process that has been going on for a century. At the end of World War I, multiethnic empires in Europe--those of the Habsburgs and...