EMBRACING THE "I" WORD:
THE UNAPOLOGETIC RETURN OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
By William D. Hartung
In my days as a student activist in the 1970s, the term "imperialism"
only turned up in the American political debate as part of a critique of
U.S. policy by someone in the anti-war or international solidarity
movements, or in the writings of left-wing academics or members of small
socialist splinter groups. So you can imagine my surprise, thirty
years later, to see the notions of imperialism and American empire
gaining a degree of mainstream respectability, this time promoted by a
strange convergence of right-wing unilateralists and liberal
"humanitarian interventionists" who see unbridled American power as the
last, best hope for building a more stable world.
The most recent case in point was the glaring red, white and blue cover
story in the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, "American
Empire (Get Used to It)." In a provocative essay that masquerades as a
realist critique, longtime human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff
suggests that Americans are in a sense of "deep denial" over their
country's imperial role, and are therefore ill-equipped to understand
the roots of our brave new post-9/11 world.
A number of Ignatieff's themes are picked up in Jay Tolson's January
13th cover story in U.S. News and World Report, "The American Empire: Is
the U.S. Trying to Shape the World? Should It?," which asserts that in
the wake of September 11th, the United States now knows that "peace,
prosperity and the spread of human rights are not automatically
guaranteed. Their survival will require the expenditure of American
will and might."
For his part, Ignatieff sums up the nature of America's imperial
"burden" as follows:
"Being an imperial power . . . is more than being the most powerful
nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is
in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the
rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction)
while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto protocol on climate change
and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest. It also
means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the
failed empires of the 20th century - Ottoman, British, and Soviet. In the 21st
century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones -
Palestine and the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, to name but two - that have
proved to be the nemeses
of empires past."
To make a long story short, in Ignatieff's view, policing the globe is
a tough job, but hey, somebody's got to do it, so it might as well be
America. After all, if you take the Bush administration's national
security strategy document at face value, the United States wants to be
a selfless imperial overlord that seeks no advantage for itself, but is
merely attempting to usher in an era of liberal democracy and free
markets for all. Ignatieff accepts the administration's claim that its
proposed war in Iraq is not about projecting U.S. power, or gaining
leverage over global oil resources: it is, in his words, "the first in a
series of struggles to contain the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, the first attempt to shut off the potential supply of
lethal technologies to a global terrorist network."
Never mind the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that Iraq has
operational links to Al Qaeda, or that the most likely source of nuclear
weapons or nuclear materials for global terrorist groups lies in
Russia's vast, poorly guarded nuclear stockpiles, or that military force
is a uniquely ineffective tool for stemming the spread of nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons. Ignatieff has bought into the
Pentagon's self-serving notion of "wars of counter-proliferation," and
he sees it as just one of the inevitable burdens of the American
empire.
Why would a human rights advocate like Ignatieff want to embrace
American imperialism? Because, he asserts, "there are many peoples who
owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power," from the
Germans and Japanese in the aftermath of World War II to the Bosnians,
Kosovars, Afghans, and "most inconveniently of all, the Iraqis," more
recently. Ignatieff's roster of freedom conveniently overlooks the
millions of people around the world - Guatemalans, Chileans, Brazilians,
Indonesians, Iranians, and to some degree, even Afghans and Iraqis - who
lost decades of potential freedom as a result of the actions of regimes
armed, supported, and in many cases installed by the U.S. government.
And it is far from clear that the new, post-Cold War version of
American interventionism will result in viable democracies in
Afghanistan or Iraq, even as the Bush administration's choice of allies
in its war on terrorism has led it to arm and aid a motley collection of
undemocratic regimes from Djibouti to Uzbekistan. But analysts like
Ignatieff, who are convinced that the slaughter in the Balkans would not
have been stopped without U.S. intervention, are willing to give the
U.S. government the benefit of the doubt in this new era.
While humanitarian interventionists like Michael Ignatieff may be
jumping on the imperial bandwagon -- even as they temper their support
by stressing the limits of American power and pressing for greater
investment in "soft power" in the form of funds for diplomacy and
foreign aid -- it is the unilateralists of the Republican right who got
the bandwagon rolling in the first place. As the New York Times
magazine noted in its "Year in Ideas" issue of December 9, 2001, under
the heading "American Imperialism, Embraced," the most vocal advocates
of a "new proud, American imperialism" in recent years have come from
the ranks of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC was
founded in 1997 to advocate a neo-Reaganite, "peace through strength"
policy that stresses force and the threat of force over treaties and
cooperation as the primary tool for projecting U.S. influence in the
world.
Signers of PNAC's founding statement included Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and other key members of the
current Bush foreign policy team. Current key players in PNAC include
neo-conservative hawks like Weekly Standard editor William Kristol,
unilateralist ideologue Robert Kagan, and former Lockheed Martin Vice
President Bruce Jackson (who also helped draft the Republican foreign
policy platform at their 2000 convention). In the run-up to the 2000
elections, PNAC published a 200-page plus report that advocated a far
more muscular (and far more costly) U.S. national security strategy that
included agenda items such as "regime change" in Iraq. So much for the
idea that this was an idea dreamed up by Bush policymakers in the light
of the nation's newfound sense of vulnerability after the 9/11 terror
attacks.
If the debate over American empire was merely a passing fancy that
happened to grab the attention of a few editors and headline writers, we
could safely put it aside and get on with our lives. But if the
provocative, "war without end" strategy set out in the Bush
administration's National Security Strategy is carried out as outlined,
it could present the single greatest threat to stability, democracy, and
peace in this new century.
That doesn't mean America should sit on its hands in the face of human
rights abuses, terrorist attacks, or the spread of nuclear weapons. It
does mean that American power needs to be applied much more
intelligently and cooperatively, in ways that strengthen international
treaties like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty instead of
undermining them; build up the capacities of the United Nations to
prevent and contain conflict; and make a positive contribution to
fighting threats to humanity, from terrorism to the scourges of AIDS,
illiteracy, and malnutrition. Rather than the "smart-bomb imperium"
that Jay Tolson refers to, the United States should be striving to be a
responsible global power that works to build institutions and
relationships that will render the use of military force a last resort
rather than a first option in the world's ubiquitous trouble spots.
The choices for American policy aren't limited to imperialism versus
isolationism, as Ignatieff and his strange bedfellows on the right seem
to suggest. There is plenty of room between these two extremes for a
policy of cooperative engagement that works to prevent violence and
build sustainable societies. But this more constructive approach will
require a deeper understanding of the limits of military power and
unilateralist bluster in solving the most important problems facing the
world today.
Just as Mark Twain and other prominent intellectuals spoke out against
the imperial projects of Teddy Roosevelt's era, a new generation of
analysts and advocates need to take a stand against the "new improved
imperialism" implicit in the Bush administration's national security
doctrine. Then, maybe some years down the road, we'll wake up to a
magazine cover with the headline "American Empire: What Were We
Thinking?"
Links:
Michael Ignatieff, "American Empire (Get Used to It)" New York Times
Magazine of January 5, 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/05EMPIRE.html?
pagewanted=print&position=top
(you might have to register or pay to view this article. Email me at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] to request that a word document version be
sent to you).
Jay Tolson "The American Empire: Is the U.S. Trying to Shape the World?
Should It?" U.S. News and World Report, January 13, 2003.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030113/misc/13empire.htm
Project for a New American Century
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
The Arms Trade Resource Center was established in 1993 to engage in public
education and policy advocacy aimed at promoting restraint in the international
arms trade.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms
