In a review she wrote of John Darwin’s “After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire,” Rosalind O’Hanlon points out, speaking of “greater European” (meaning Europe and America) empires, “the values of liberal individualism and free markets are not the antithesis of empire, but actually themselves the moral framework for a new kind of imperial power, their application apparently universal but in reality available only to the favored western world.” This last note is the key to how the world sees the United States and whether it is as benevolent as it thinks itself to be. After all, it is in the name of higher values of liberty and justice that it invaded Iraq. Not only did it violate its own declared values and principles but it even failed, and miserably at that, to bring about the single most important outcome that legitimizes the rule of an empire: order.

Empires do go through cycles and inevitably rise and fall. The 14th century Arab-Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldoun wrote on the cyclical nature of power and identified causes similar to what Murphy and others detect in the social and political corrosion of declining empires. So the question of whether or not the American Empire will give way to a new rising one is pertinent. To the extent that world order necessitates an ordering power and that for the foreseeable future American power will have the capacity to play that role, one needs to understand the nature of that power. The reverse is true as well. Given the demographic realities of the 21st Century (most people as of next year will be living in urban areas), democratic aspirations and technological advances that people and nations have access to, an empire or a simple superpower cannot lead or order the world as it sees fit. Without taking this simple but overarching reality into consideration, the United States will not be able to re-legitimize its power in the world.

For long America’s imperial temptations and its democratic instincts pulled the nation in opposite directions. Even when the world stood aghast at imperial arrogance and adventures, the democratic dynamics provided a correction to their view of America. This is no longer the case today, since American democracy itself appears to be undermined by the authoritarian impulses legitimated by fear of terrorism and by the corroding power of money and influence. Thus the need to discuss American capitalism and its relationship to power that is usually absent in discussions of America’s relations with the world.

The barbarians brought the end of the Roman Empire that had already corroded within. No corresponding repeat act ought to be expected now. Yet unless American power levels with the rest of the world, shows itself more sensitive to the provision of the collective good on a global scale and acts less selfishly, it will have missed its “second chance” to have a major say in shaping the order of the world. Without justice domestically and globally, an empire cannot rule. That may be the challenge of American power, whether imperial or not.