The New American Empire?
Americans have an enduring aversion to planting the flag on foreign soil. Is that attitude changing?
It was not a move that President William McKinley would look back on with pride. His reluctant 1898 decision to declare war on Spain ended up humbling America's shaky opponent and bringing in new territories from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. But for the first time in its history, the United States had joined those world powers that were intent on planting flags on foreign lands. Having often tried to justify the war to himself and others, the 25th president concluded, a year before his death, that it was the greatest grief of his life.
McKinley is not the only American troubled by seeing the nation's name used in conjunction with the word empire. Today, with talk of regime change in Iraq, pre-emptive strikes against potential adversaries, and democracy-promotion efforts in the Islamic world, many are wondering whether the world's only superpower is succumbing to the imperial itch. Members of the Bush administration flatly reject the notion. "The United States does not have territorial ambitions, or ambitions to control other people," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told U.S. News. Beyond all the talk, though, and even beyond the nation's huge cultural and economic influence, looms America's unprecedented military pre-eminence, which has allowed it--as in the Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--to subdue foes with modest expenditures of treasure and little or no blood. Are we witnessing a smart-bomb imperium?
To some, the imperialism question is not even a matter for debate. In publications ranging from the left-wing Nation to Patrick Buchanan's newly launched American Conservative, critics charge that White House rhetoric is clear proof of imperial ambition. "The conservative movement has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement I grew up with," says Buchanan. And from the left, Jonathan Schell and John Hamilton declare that the United States has arrived at an "imperial moment." But it is not the first time, they argue, the ominous precedent being the "splendid little war" of 1898, the subject of former diplomat Warren Zimmermann's timely new history, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.
Certainly not all Americans are troubled by the administration's new assertiveness in global affairs. In addition to those in the influential neoconservative camp, including columnist Charles Krauthammer, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, policy analyst Robert Kagan, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, there are many others, both inside and outside the administration, who encourage and applaud the boldness of President Bush's grand strategy. Indeed, a good number of liberal intellectuals in the past decade came to believe in the need for humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, and as a result they now find themselves supporting--or at least drawn to--the notion of regime change in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.
Other supporters are even less equivocal. Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that the Bush White House is far more coherent in its foreign-policy statements than was President Clinton's, though he is quick to acknowledge that the single greatest cause of this clarity is the rude shock of 9/11. "When we are attacked," he says, "it tends to give rise to new strategies."
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