Moreover, who would wish to cooperate with an occupying force that spent all its resources on itself and devoted next to nothing to aid or reconstruction? A successful empire is seldom solely based on coercion; there must be some economic dividends for the ruled as well as the rulers, if only to buy the loyalty of indigenous elites. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan the amounts of money the United States has made available to potential local partners have been paltry.

To put it bluntly, the United States is acting like a colossus with an attention deficit disorder engaged in cut-price colonization. And that is perhaps the reason why this vastly powerful economy, with its extraordinary military capability, has had such a very disappointing record when it has sought to bring about changes of regime abroad. According to one recent study, just four out of 16 US military interventions in foreign countries have been successful in establishing US-style institutions over the past century. The worst failures—in Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba, and Cambodia—might well be attributed to this fatal combination of a truncated time horizon and inadequate resources for non-military purposes.

There is no question, as we have seen, that the United States has the raw economic resources to take on the old British role as underwriter of a globalized, liberalized economic system. Nor is there any doubt that it has the military capability to do the job. On both scores, the United States is already a far more powerful empire than Britain’s ever was. Perhaps—though I am less persuaded about this—its “soft power” is also greater. Yet the unspoken American Empire suffers from serious structural weaknesses. It imports rather than exports high quality human capital. It also imports more capital than it exports—and exports virtually none to pivotal regions like the Middle East. It underestimates the need to act in partnership with allied great powers. And its efforts at nation-building are both short-term and under-funded.

Some US neo-imperialists like to quote Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to encourage US President William McKinley’s empire-building efforts in the Philippines. But Kipling wrote another poem, two years earlier, which they would also do well to remember. Entitled “Recessional,” it was a somber intimation of mortality, perfectly crafted to temper late Victorian delusions of grandeur:

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!