The United States has maintained extensive international hierarchies over the Western Hemisphere for more than a century and over Western Europe and Northeast Asia for nearly seven decades. More recently, it has extended similar hierarchies over states in the Middle East, and especially the Persian Gulf. This paper examines how the United States exercises more or less authority over other countries and, in turn, the domestic politics of subordination within client states. Most important, in a world of juridically sovereign states that are, in principle, formal equals, it asks how is U.S. rule accepted as legitimate? The core argument is that hierarchy benefits subordinate countries but has interstate and intrastate distributional consequences for domestic ruling coalitions and regime types. When the gains from hierarchy are large or subordinate societies share policy preferences similar to those of the United States, international hierarchy is compatible with democracy. Thus, American indirect rule has coexisted with democracy in West European since World War II. When the gains from hierarchy are small and the median citizen has policy preferences distant from those of the United States, international hierarchy requires autocracy and the benefits of foreign rule will be concentrated within the governing elite. This has characterized U.S. rule over Central America for much of the last century. In the contemporary Middle East, the gains from hierarchy also appear small and policy preferences are distant from those of the United States. Despite rhetorical support for democracy, even in the Arab Spring, the United States has consistently backed sympathetic authoritarian rulers. The paper concludes with an analysis of the tradeoffs between subordination to the United States and democracy within the newest states of the American empire.

The events that hastily came to be called “The Arab Spring” have done much to reopen the question of what it means for a Muslim society to be ruled legitimately and to force Islamist parties to account for their visions of sovereignty and authority in the public sphere. This paper provides a historical and conceptual background to certain modern attempts to harmonize ideals of divine and popular sovereignty. I pay special attention to the pre-2011 doctrines of Tunisian Islamist leader, Rashid al-Ghannushi, particularly his attempt to reconcile visions of divine and popular sovereignty through the doctrine of a universal covenant of vicegerency (istikhlaf). I contrast this doctrine of a “caliphate of man” with other modern attempts to institutionalize divine sovereignty (Saudi Arabia and Iran), while suggesting a set of ambiguities this doctrine raises both for the idea of rule by divine law (shari‘a) and for post-revolutionary expectations of democracy within a “civil state” (dawla madaniyya).