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America is Not Rome by Jon Basil Utley
[Posted July 7, 2000]
Norman Podhoretz, along with many would-be imperialists of the political left,
have recently criticized "isolationists of the right" for opposing the American
attempt to become a world empire.
What these critics don't understand is that America can never be what they want
it to be. The United States is institutionally incapable of running an empire
or even being an effective world policeman. Our military interventions will
always be inconclusive, inconsistent and hypocritical.
In our constitutional government, foreign policy is not made by a few �lites as
it was in the British or Roman Empires. In England, the franchise was limited
to property owners and a few percentage points of the population. Both Britain
and Rome had a single, all powerful legislature.
For America, the written Constitution, and even more so, the Bill of Rights
(neither of which constrained the British nor Roman governments) are designed
specifically for preserving freedom. This is done by dispersing the
centralization of political power necessary for foreign military ventures.
The U.S. system works for self-defense, but is woeful for any sustained, non-
vital foreign military interventions. Our democracy also is designed so that
those who "care" control foreign policy. Because most Americans don't "care,"
those who do are usually promoting specific, sectarian, and short term
interests. Once upon a time it was corporations such as United Fruit or
Standard Oil, or the New York banks, which dominated foreign policy. Today
corporate interests come second to television focused atrocities and domestic
pressure groups.
Media Wars
It is primarily television, often directed by skillful public relations, which
selects the victims of the moment. American goodwill then creates a groundswell
for intervention, which usually ends up causing more misery and chaos.
Clinton's bombing of Serbia left an inconclusive, festering mess in the
Balkans, as well as an economic disaster because of blockaded Danube River
traffic. It frightened the Russians about NATO/U.S. intentions and stimulated
other nations, including China to update their weaponry. The end was far more
deaths and instability than if America had not intervened militarily in the
first place. Generals aren't paid or trained to think about post-war
consequences; they're only job is to "win."
An earlier example of TV terror was the story of 20 babies being thrown out of
incubators in a Kuwait hospital by the Iraqi invaders. It was a lie, but it
helped get us to attack Iraq. Now there are a half million dead children as a
consequence of our bombing sanitation and electric generation facilities and
following it with economic blockade which disallows imports for reconstruction
or even chlorine to purify drinking water.
A smaller example is Haiti. First Washington decimated its peoples' livelihood
with economic sanctions, and then invaded. Today Haitians are worse off than
before the intervention and more dependent upon U.S. aid. Remember when Haiti
was a prime supplier of baseball gloves and equipment before the embargo? It's
fledgling industry never recovered from the embargo and now other countries'
suppliers have replaced it. In Panama too America invaded and killed to pluck
out a President and put him in a Florida jail, ostensibly because of drug
smuggling, which now thrives there more even than before.
When television tires of a subject, America forgets about it, and walks away,
either abandoning its mission (Haiti, Panama, Somalia) or locking up the losing
nation in a blockade leaving its people in utmost misery (Iraq and Serbia). As
former President Jimmy Carter put it:
The approach the United States has taken recently has been to devise a solution
that best suits its own purposes--- recruit at least tacit support in which
ever forum it can best influence, provide the dominant military force, present
an ultimatum to recalcitrant parties and then take punitive action against the
entire nation to force compliance. The often tragic result of this final
decision is that already oppressed citizens suffer (even more)..."
Yet observes the New Republic, "this (American) Monster is more like an
elephant --bumbling rather than bloodthirsty, oblivious rather than fierce."
Witness, for example, America's bombing of Serbia's Danube River bridges (done
against French opposition). This has caused billions of dollars of losses to
the struggling Balkan and Black Sea nations, which use barges for bulk
transport. Eastern Europe's major river transport is paralyzed, yet it's barely
reported in America's press and Washington even tried to prevent rebuilding of
the bridges.
Empire and the Rule of Law
A policeman can be effective in two ways. One, as a fair arbiter who inspires
trust and respect and follows a consistent rule of law, as did Rome and England
in their heyday. Secondly, as a feared oppressor of the neighborhood ruling by
terror, force and blackmail. This second way is very, very expensive and
inefficient. America can't be a "fair" policeman because of the way our foreign
policies are made, so more and more of the world sees us as the "Rogue
Superpower," as a Chicago Tribune article put it.
Washington's foreign policy reeks with hypocrisy. We destroyed Serbia for
refusing to grant de facto independence to Kosovo and because of its
suppression of Albanian insurrection (the mass expulsion of Albanians is now
proven to have begun only after American bombing started). But we subsidize
Turkey while it killed 37,000 Kurds, including bombing them in Iraq, and
removing them from their homes just as the Serbs did to Albanians. America
destroyed Iraq for invading Kuwait, a former province, and now demands that
Iraq be defenseless against its neighbors whom America arms to the teeth. In
Africa we've stood by while millions have been murdered.
Foreign nations can't trust Washington--because it's impossible for Washington
to be trustworthy. We decry accused election irregularities in Latin America,
but are silent about dictatorship in Saudi Arabia and other oil producing
states. The list is endless. We pity the Chechens, but try to starve the Serbs
by blockade.
Furthermore, Washington attacked in fundamental violation of international law.
Articles 2(4) and (7) on the UN Charter prohibit interventions in the domestic
jurisdiction of any country and the use of force by one state against the
another. The Geneva Convention prohibits targeting non-military targets (e.g. a
cigarette factory). The Nuremberg Code forbids tarting a war and attacking a
sovereign nation which was innocent of any aggression. The Nato Treaty,
Articles 1 and 7, declare it a defensive organization only committed to force
if one of its members is attacked.
International law, like most law, although it circumscribes the rich and
powerful, is generally for their benefit by codifying rules for the protection
of establishment power and property. It is President Clinton who has now
undermined it for the foreseeable future, replacing efforts to establish a rule
of law, imperfect as it may be, with brute force. "A backlash may be brewing,
but it is brought on my America's tendency to treat international norms and
treaties as though they should apply to everyone but itself," wrote Thomas
Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment.
Already there are consequences. As Ivan Eland of Cato has written,
About 40 percent of terrorist attacks perpetrated worldwide have been directed
at U.S. targets. It is unusual for a country with friendly neighbors and no
civil war or insurrection to be such a prominent target for terrorists. We
should first ask what motivates terrorists, state-sponsored and independent, to
target the United States..... The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st
Century, (headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) answered the
question somewhat more honestly than others in the foreign policy
establishment: 'Much of the world will resent and oppose us, if not for the
simple fact of our pre-eminence, then for the fact that others often perceive
the United States as exercising its power with arrogance and self-
absorption...States, terrorists, and other disaffected groups will acquire
weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption, and some will use them.
Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.'
Foreign Policy Driven by Domestic Politics
NATO expansion was proposed during the last Presidential election primarily to
gain votes among Americans of Polish and other central European ancestry,
particularly in key mid-Western states. The expansion violated tacit agreements
with Russia for its withdrawal from Eastern Europe and did tremendous damage to
the pro-democracy forces inside Russia. It was the "crowning humiliation" for
Russia, said Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins' Nitze School.
The Armenian American lobby brought about a law which makes it illegal to send
even relief supplies to Azerbaijan which is the key nation for Caspian oil; our
Cuba policy is controlled by Cuban Americans in Miami; we invaded Haiti to
satisfy the Black Caucus in Congress; Albanian and Croatian descended Americans
paid for major public relations efforts to demonize Serbs (less adept and
organized to present their positions) and so on. The current furor to defend
Taiwan doesn't come from nowhere. The Taiwan government "funds at least 10
lobbying operations in Washington.the most public of these is $4.5 million for
Cassidy and Asso.which recently lobbied Congress for passage of the Taiwan
Security Enhancement Act." (The Washington Post, March 23, 2000)
The Washington Times (February 25) reports how Indian immigrants, grown wealthy
from the computer business, have helped tilt Washington away from its
traditional favoring of Pakistan. Only the Latin Americans (other than Cubans)
are not yet organized into foreign interests' lobbies, but already some Mexican
American leaders are calling on their brethren to emulate other ethnic lobbies.
This problem of foreign policy was well described in US News, "Multicultural
Foreign Policy in Washington---The ship of state is more likely to be tugged by
US ethnic groups than by foreign money." And now there is television, as Henry
Kissinger wrote, "Vigorous and competitive media have compounded the tendency
for foreign policy to become a subdivision of domestic politics." The American
political system simply has little defense against single interest foreign
policy lobbies pressing for "their" agenda in Congress against an amorphous
"general will."
The pressures were well explained in the recent furor about returning the Cuban
boy, Elian. "You know that if you kick the Cuba issue, you're going to have a
bad day," said former representative David Skaggs (D-Colo.), who clashed with
the hard line on Havana, and paid for it with lost funding for his district.
"Other than to about 10 members, it doesn't matter that much. [But] when there
are a few people who will die for the issue, and nobody else gets anywhere
close to that, they can have their way."
Even America's Allies Fear Washington
Even nations which try to do everything Washington demands can find it casually
trampling their interests with barely a thought. Stratfor.com, an excellent
intelligence service, writes:
"The sheer size of American interests creates a management problem in which
avoiding devastating outcomes for other nations is impossible - even if this
was the American goal, which it is frequently not. Policy makers at the center
can't possibly oversee the range of issues being dealt with. The opportunity
for interests inside and outside the United States to manipulate the decision-
making process at the microscopic level is enormous. While the central thrust
of policy is manageable, the micro level is easily manipulated. The result is a
seemingly random set of policies that make it impossible for many countries to
find a stable, safe standpoint in their relations with the United States.
"With isolated resistance and accommodation being difficult for many to
exercise, the natural result is coalition-building, designed to constrain the
United States. This is not a simple process and doesn't operate in a straight
line. As the optimal outcome, most nations want a shift in U.S. policy.
It is difficult to even get American attention on most policy issues relevant
to weaker nations, let alone to generate sufficient threats to motivate the
United States to shift its policies. The virtue of anti-American coalition-
building is not that it builds a coalition, but that it increases the
probability of attracting American attention and generating sufficient threats
to force favorable policy shifts in Washington.
"Thus, most countries move into anti-U.S. coalitions less out of a desire to
confront the United States than out of a desire to reach accommodation with it.
For example, the Russians and Chinese both engaged in anti-American coalition
building with each other less out of a desire to confront the United States
than out of a desire to extract concessions. To some extent this process works.
But the range of demands placed on the United States makes universal, or even
frequent, accommodation impossible."
The recent growing raprochement between Russia and Germany can similarly be
explained as a consequence of America's roughshod policies in the Balkans and
Iraq. Equally in South America the above happened just weeks ago when
Washington tried to get the Organization of American States to put on economic
sanctions against Peru. That nation had been doing almost everything Washington
wanted, particularly cooperating in the "drug war." But domestic politics
pushed for demanding Peru's release of a captured American terrorist and
questions about a local TV station's ownership. The other Latin nations all
voted against Washington except for Costa Rica.
America Can't be Trusted
Graveyards are littered all over the world with partisans who believed
America's call and then were left abandoned. Most recently this happened in
Kurdish and Shiite Iraq. After Iraq's defeat Washington called upon them to
rebel, but then abandoned them to be crushed by Saddam's Guard. But it began
long ago with the Hungarians' uprising in 1956, called for by America and then
abandoned to slaughter. The Cubans at the Bay of Pigs were originally promised
air support, which was than withdrawn when they were already at sea going in to
attack. In Viet Nam there were abandoned South Vietnamese, and so on.
Typically, a main Israeli argument for having its massive military
establishment is that it dare not rely on Washington.
America Can't Mount Insurrections
Mounting or supporting insurrections has been equally bumbling. Efforts to
mount one against Saddam in Kurdistan by the CIA were detailed in Newsweek. It
describes the conflicting laws in Washington forbidding assassinations of
foreign leaders, millions of dollars disappearing into unknown pockets, the
abandonment of pro-U.S. guerrillas and their families, the calling off of
attacks at the last minute, and then the FBI investigating the CIA's personnel.
This all make Washington's efforts at undercover and guerrilla warfare look
incompetent and dangerous to foreign allies. America has tremendous strengths,
but mounting secret operations in foreign nations isn't one of them.
America Can't Keep Secrets
Then there's the problem of military secrets flowing to foreign nations. We've
never been able to avoid it for long. America's strength is its openness and
its recruitment of the best brains from the whole world. All our great
scientific advances leaned heavily on immigrants (the atom bomb itself came
from German Jewish scientists and today most Ph.D. candidates in the hard
sciences are immigrants). Yet all these, now mainly Chinese and Indians,
naturally also have some old allegiances and ideologies as well to the nations
from which they came. Even besides many immigrants' dual loyalties, Americans
can't keep secrets, much less so now with the Internet. That's another reason
why our safest foreign policy is in not making so many enemies.
America Can't Take Casualties
Elliot Abrams, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, puts it well:
"...a superpower willing to bomb but not to fight, willing to inflict a
tremendous amount of pain on others to avoid the slightest risks to itself,
under a leadership more sensitive to poll data than to the moral considerations
involved in deciding which wars are just---that is a picture that should repel
us."
America Can't Plan Ahead
There's always been the absence of post-war planning. America, when it goes to
war, thinks only of "winning," never about what to do afterwards. The classic
answer was by former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during the First Iraq war
when he answered at a press conference, "Well, we haven't thought much about
what to do afterwards." With World War II our post war "policy" objective was
mainly to deliver East Europe and Manchuria (China's industrial heartland) to
Soviet communist occupation. With World War I, we helped destroy Europe and
then walked away. Usually, as in Korea and Vietnam, policy was simply to return
to the status quo.
America's Legal System is Hostile to Empire
Another great weakness, since Clinton, is a "newly hostile legal system,"
according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs ("The Bullied Pulpit," Jan,
2000.) The Supreme Court in 1997 in the Paula Jones case, cleared the way for
private suits against sitting Presidents. We are just beginning to find out
what this can mean. American hypocrisy "on the world stage," argues Foreign
Affairs, "Has everything to do with the weak executive." Also the recent
American supported arrests of foreign leaders, such as Pinochet in England, set
the precedent for foreign nations to arrest American leaders and soldiers for
"war crimes" as determined in their courts. The can of worms has only just been
opened on this front and already there are howls from Congress that Americans
must be treated differently.
Losing Our Freedoms
Finally, world empire means tremendous stresses within America and vast new
government intrusions upon our privacy and freedom. As foreign terrorists and
homegrown ones tried to retaliate against our military actions overseas,
Washington would clamp down draconian police measures upon all the rest of us.
Every computer, every telephone, every mailbox would be subject to government
surveillance and reporting. Even without a major terrorist event the Clinton
Crime Bill of 1994, supported by establishment Republicans, proposed gutting
the 4th Amendment to allow warrantless searches and seizures in anybody's home
by federal or even state police. The proposed law was (barely) stopped by the
"Freshmen" Republicans and "old" Liberals. But efforts continue. Congress has
now granted the FBI new and extraordinary wiretapping laws.
In February, 1999 Defense Secretary William Cohen told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that Americans might have to surrender some civil rights in
order to gain more security in the fight against domestic terrorism. "We need
greater intelligence and that means not only foreign-gathered intelligence but
here at home," Cohen said. "That is going to put us on a collision course with
rights of privacy. It's something that democracies have got to come to grips
with -- how much are we going to demand of our intelligence agencies and how
much are we willing to give up in the way of intrusion into our lives? That is
a tradeoff that is going to have to come."
Already lawmakers are considering legislation that would enhance the use of
military forces in domestic law enforcement capacities. The FY 2000 Defense
Authorization Bill, passed by the House, includes provisions that would provide
local law enforcement agencies increased access to military assets without
necessarily having to compensate the Pentagon for their use. Another law
currently proposed by Senator Hatch and the Senate Judiciary Committee would
allow federal police into anybody's home to search their computers and papers
without a warrant or even notice after the fact. It's been discovered and
opposed by Representative Barr of Georgia and activist Paul Weyrich.
And, of course, there's the costs, hundreds of billions for military and police
forces. Just the Persian Gulf fleet and Air Force cost $50 billion a year.
In conclusion, the greatest cost of world empire to America would be the loss
of our own freedoms even without terrorist actions. As economist Ludwig Von
Mises argued, "Liberty and empire are incompatible. A government powerful
enough to wage aggressive war on foreign peoples will also aggress against its
own people."
To preserve our own freedoms and best serve the rest of the world, our foreign
policy should be non-interventionist, non-threatening, and non-militaristic.
The whole world yearns to copy our prosperity and freedom; young people
everywhere yearn to be like Americans (except when we bomb or starve them).
Reaganomics' free market ideas conquered the world. With economic strength and
a politics of fairness and non-intervention we can prosper and keep our
freedom. We don't need an empire and empire won't bring us security. America is
simply incapable of any other consistent foreign policy. America should be a
beacon, because it can't be an effective policeman.
* * * * *
Mr. Utley is the Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is
a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, studied
languages in Europe, and lived 15 years in South America. He was a foreign
correspondent in South America for Knight/Ridder newspapers and now writes on
foreign affairs for WorldNetDaily.com. He has served on the Board of Directors
or Advisory Boards of many conservative organizations including Accuracy in
Media, Council for Inter-American Security, Conservative Caucus, etc. He is the
Editor of againstBombing.com. Send him MAIL. [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
See also MISES.ORG ON EMPIRE [ http://www.mises.org/empire.asp ] and the best
book on this subject, The Costs of War.
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The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
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repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
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the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
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[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifest, Murray N. Rothbard,
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