The empire below deck

The American aircraft carrier was built to terrify other nations. The USS Abraham Lincoln has instead become something far more revealing: a floating monument to an empire powerful enough to bomb half the world, yet too arrogant, overstretched and politically diseased to care properly for the people it sends to do the bombing.

The symbolism is almost vulgar in its perfection.

A nuclear-powered supercarrier — one of the most sophisticated instruments of organized violence ever constructed — prowls the waters near Iran, launching aircraft and advertising Washington’s capacity to reach virtually anywhere on Earth.

Below deck, meanwhile, sailors endure exhaustion, psychological strain, deteriorating conditions and the torment of a deployment whose end repeatedly disappears over the horizon.

Behold American primacy: exquisite machinery, limitless ambition, exhausted human beings.

The contradiction is not incidental. It is the empire in miniature.

Aircraft carriers are floating political theology. They proclaim that America is everywhere; that oceans are highways of command; that no country is sufficiently distant to escape Washington’s attention. Presidents display them as steel embodiments of “credibility.” Generals shuffle them between regions like casino chips. Think-tank strategists move them across maps while never having to smell the machinery, miss the birthdays or contemplate the psychological wreckage below deck.

And there in lies the obscenity.

The American ruling elite experiences war as abstraction. Sailors experience it as life.

Around five thousand people inhabit the Lincoln. Its crew has endured months at sea and prolonged combat operations. Families have described severe exhaustion and mental-health distress; one sailor was rescued after going overboard, while relatives have alleged additional alarming incidents. The Navy disputes claims of a broader suicide crisis.

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Very well. But bureaucratic dispute cannot conceal the larger reality: Washington is stretching human beings because its imperial commitments have stretched beyond political sanity.

The Pentagon calls this “readiness.” Naturally.

Empire possesses a magnificent vocabulary for disguising dysfunction. Exhaustion becomes sacrifice. Overextension becomes resolve. Strategic failure becomes deterrence. Indefinite deployment becomes duty. And when human beings begin cracking beneath the weight, the institution that imposed the burden congratulates them on their resilience.

The ruling elite has perfected the art of converting its incompetence into somebody else’s heroism.

The United States maintains not a military of territorial defense but an apparatus of global coercion: hundreds of overseas installations, carrier groups, bomber fleets, intelligence networks, regional commands and permanent war plans spanning continents. Washington must confront Iran, contain China, reassure monarchies, protect Israel, encircle Russia, patrol oceans and prepare for tomorrow’s crisis while managing yesterday’s catastrophe.
Eventually even an empire discovers that omnipresence is expensive.

The decision to send the George Washington from the western Pacific to relieve the Lincoln captures the farce beautifully. One carrier is exhausted in the Middle East, so another must leave Asia to replace it. Washington plugs one strategic hole by opening another, then publishes a press release describing the maneuver as flexibility.

This is not omnipotence.

It is overstretch wearing aviator sunglasses.

And beneath the geopolitical theater lies class power. The people ordering these deployments do not endure them. Presidents speak beneath chandeliers. Cabinet officials issue solemn statements. Defense contractors count revenues. Television generals discuss “acceptable costs.”

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The enlisted sailor becomes the acceptable cost.

He sleeps inside American foreign policy. She misses anniversaries inside it. They inhale its machinery, endure its monotony, absorb its anxiety and discover that the glamorous architecture of global domination contains an astonishing quantity of fatigue, loneliness and industrial grime.

Imperialism always looks cleaner from a satellite.

The sailors are therefore neither simple heroes nor simple villains. They are agents of coercive power and, simultaneously, expendable components within the machinery exercising it. Sympathy does not require absolution. It requires understanding who sends whom to kill, who profits, who decides, and who pays.

American militarism survives by persuading Americans that war happens elsewhere.

The bombs fall elsewhere. Hospitals collapse elsewhere. Families mourn elsewhere.

But prolonged war has a nasty habit of returning home disguised as insomnia, broken marriages, psychological injury and sons and daughters who no longer understand why they were sent away in the first place.

That is the question Washington fears most: why?

Why are we here? Why must American “security” require permanent military domination thousands of miles from American shores? Why does every distant conflict become a referendum on American credibility? And why does preserving that credibility always require someone with less power than the policymaker to bleed for it?

The answer is increasingly obvious.

Because empire cannot admit limits without admitting what it is.

So it continues. More deployments. More enemies. More “resolve.” More exhausted sailors proving the supposedly inexhaustible power of the state exhausting them.

Above deck: roaring jets, nuclear propulsion, billion-dollar technology, imperial choreography.

Below deck: fatigue, uncertainty, human beings waiting to go home.

The bunker remains armed to the teeth.

But beneath the flight deck, the rot is becoming difficult to perfume.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.