One of the great ironies of the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th was the sudden fascination and celebration of the idea of American Empire. While the topic was occasionally kicked around by some—mostly on the far left side of western discourse—the moment when the United States was seemingly at its most vulnerable was also the moment when the recognition of an imperial potential on the part of the United States became the most widely recognized. Alongside the reckoning of the enormous power and influence of the United States was a moral imperative for the imperial project. The attacks in New York and Washington demonstrated that large areas of the world were governed by rogue states and brutal dictators that could provide safe havens for terrorists and other unsavory actors around the world. In the emerging world of globalization, maleficent actors had access to capabilities that empowered them to an unprecedented extent, suggesting they could not be left alone in some isolated mountain valley where they could possibly metastasize into a global movement. For this reason, the United States, with the help of its allies, had to go on the offensive and use all its power and influence to destroy these pockets of barbarity while constructing the conditions that would prevent any chance of their resurrection.
Two types of advocates emerged with this logic in mind—one that argued US power and might were needed to make the world a safer and more prosperous place but that a more interventionist and active role in the world did not necessarily mean an embrace of imperialism or “American Empire.” The other type did embrace the idea of American imperialism and American Empire. It is this latter category this article will focus on.
Among those who believe that some kind of “American Empire” exists and that the world is better off for having the United States adopt this position, one can identify two subgroups. The first is what we might label a “liberal imperialist.” This advocate believes in the importance of traditional liberal values like free and interdependent trading relationships, use of international institutions to facilitate cooperation among states, and a preference for states to be ruled via democratic government. However, as much of the world refuses or is unable to submit to these principles, the United States, as the world’s most powerful state and chief booster of this rule-based order, should embrace an imperial role akin to the British or the French in the nineteenth century and intervene in those areas that have yet to understand or appreciate the light of liberal values.
Examples of this “liberal imperialism”[1] include someone like Michael Ignatieff, who in 2003 called for, in his study of nation-building efforts by the United States, a more imperialistic attitude toward intervention in places like the Balkans and Afghanistan. This would yield greater success than the current short-term mindset that emphasizes “empire on the cheap or “empire lite.”[2] In this sense, Ignatieff can be distinguished from a host of other advocates for a muscular American interventionism who nevertheless avoid, refrain or dismiss from their discussion of interventionist foreign policy the existence and parameters of an American Empire (more about them in a future article).
A far more articulate advocate of liberal American Empire is Niall Ferguson. His 2004 book[3] Colossus remains the most powerful argument for both the existence of American Empire and the moral imperative for the United States to accept and embrace the role of “imperialists.” Focusing on the sacrifices necessary to maintain its imperial status, Ferguson insists that if the United States changes its attitude and gets over its “softness” toward long-term commitments to nation-building overseas and protecting the “public goods” of international capitalism, the American Empire can endure far into the future. Part of embracing this role would be getting its domestic fiscal and budgetary house in order, as the costs of long-term overseas commitments can be endured if programs like social security and medicare bankrupt the republic.[4] In this way, the American Empire is not merely a question about foreign policy, but about what each individual American is willing to give to the cause. In one particularly interesting passage, Ferguson laments the short attention spans of young US adults and explains how these spoiled and privileged adolescents lack the fortitude or vision to be the empire builders the US needs to be great:
But few, if any, of the graduates of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton aspire to spend their lives trying to turn a sun-scorched sand pit like Iraq into the prosperous capitalist democracy of Paul Wolfowitz’s imagination. American’s brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund.[5]
The second type of liberal imperialist argues the world needs American Empire because of the exalted status of the United States itself, and not necessarily because the United States is in the best nation or the only nation to defend a liberal world order. From this perspective, 21st century liberal empire gets its virtue from its origins in the founding ideas of the United States and the spread of those ideas with the expansion of US power around the world in the succeeding two hundred odd years. Implied in these arguments is that if the US was not a liberal country, American Empire would still be worthy of support. From their perspective American Empire is more important than American Empire.
Many so-called neoconservatives fall into this category. The controversial writer Dinesh D’Souza is a good preliminary example. Writing in 2002, D’Souza remarked the United States “is the most magnanimous power ever,” before giving examples of how the United States respects human rights and confers great benefits on the nations that it enters and occupies. He also comments on the role of US soft power, observing that in a “hotel in Barbados or Bombay, the bellhop is whistling the theme from “Titanic.” African boys in remote villages wear baseball caps. Millions of people around the globe want to move to America. Countless people are drawn to America’s technology, freedom, and way of life.”[6] For these and a host of other reasons, the American Empire is different than the empires of the past both in its power and its size, leading D’Souza to conclude “let us have more of it.”[7]
Other neoconservatives take their cue from the classic British poetry of Kipling or Tennyson (Ferguson also very much makes references to these poets). In making “The Case for an American Empire,” Iraqi war advocate Max Boot observed that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”[8] It was up to the United States, Boot continued, to assume the mantle of the British Empire and “Take Up the White Man’s Burden” to bring stability, democracy and prosperity to the regions of the world where chaos and mayhem give shelter to terrorists planning more evil deeds. Other neoconservatives invoked older cultural imagery, with Robert Kaplan quoting generously from ancient Greek and Roman texts that celebrated national greatness and the obligation of empires to rid the world of barbarism, since “Thucydides teaches us that civilization represses barbarism but can never eradicate it.”
This is but a small sample of the arguments that posit both the existence of an American Empire and the need for such an empire to exist in order to protect all that is good and virtuous in the world, whether that is civilization or human rights or democracy or any other “progressive” set of values. But many foreign policy analysts and practitioners are uncomfortable with this sort of language and go out of their way to avoid it. One need only look to the words of one of the Iraqi War architects, Donald Rumsfeld, (quoted in the last post) for evidence of this. This position of American Empire denialism but embracing of American interventionism is of particular interest in that it represents perhaps the most problematic and contradictory position—how does one insist the United States involve itself in countless conflicts and power rivalries around the world without believing something like an American Empire exists. These arguments will be explored in a subsequent post.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/20/top-10-warning-signs-of-liberal-imperialism/
[2] Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (New York: Vintage, 2003).
[3] Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of the America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/our-imperial-imperative/303127/
[5] Ferguson, 204.
[6]Dinesh D’Souza, “In praise of American Empire,” Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2002: See https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0426/p11s01-coop.html
[8] Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” The Weekly Standard, October, 2001. See https://www.weeklystandard.com/max-boot/the-case-for-american-empire
Dr. Eric Fattor 