On a sweltering
Washington sidewalk on July 17, a handful of protesters berated
the stream of bespectacled wonks entering the "stink tank"
known as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- famous worldwide
as the home of former Pentagon official Richard Perle and former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In the air-conditioned comfort inside,
the lusty strains of "Rule Britannia" welcomed a capacity
crowd to AEI's version of a summertime idyll. We were assembled
to hear two vaunted thinkers of the new, new world order debate
the proposition that America is, and should be, an empire.
As recently
as two years ago, describing the United States as an empire defined
one as a Marxist. No longer. British imperial historian Niall
Ferguson and neo-conservative guru Robert Kagan did not debate
the proposition so much as quibble over the meaning of words.
Both promoted an image of the US as a benevolent superpower with
one discernible interest - to render the world safe for democracy
and free enterprise. This interest, the debaters agreed, was noble,
even altruistic.
But despite
its virtue, posited Ferguson, the United States was an "empire
in denial." Because Americans stubbornly refused to acknowledge
their global dominion, the US did not act as an imperium should.
It dispatched Marines to troubled tropical climes on the false
premise that, once they disciplined the unruly natives, they would
be home in time to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. The US practiced
"Wal-Mart" expansionism, consistently spending a fraction
of what was required to pacify conquered countries. Finally, it
relied too heavily on military coercion, failing to secure the
collaboration of vassal states that made empires last. In the
era of suitcase-sized nukes and Osama bin Laden, such a "colossus
with attention-deficit disorder" was a danger to itself and
others. The US should come to terms with its supremacy, and rule
the world more responsibly.
Not exactly,
Kagan rejoined. The US was not a fumbling empire in denial, in
fact not an empire at all, but merely the most successful "global
hegemon" in history. After Ferguson's Oxonian verbal rigor,
Kagan's reasoning seemed flaccid. The US, he asserted, could not
be an empire because it had no stated imperial design. (Didn't
Britain also acquire its domain "in a fit of absentmindedness?")
Americans had neither an imperial hymn like "Rule Britannia"
nor an imperial poet like Rudyard Kipling. Contrary to popular
belief, the US became less imperialistic in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries - an implicit admission that manifest
destiny was a doctrine of empire building. The ideology of American
dominion subsided as American power grew. That, Kagan insisted,
was the source of everyone's confusion.
Much to the
audience's enjoyment, Kagan and Ferguson sparred further over
terminology. "You don't call another country the 'evil empire'
if you don't secretly believe that you are the 'good empire,'"
said Ferguson impishly. For now in Washington such debates are
merely "great fun," in the words of one departing spectator.
But the intellectual jousting betrayed a growing, mostly unspoken
consensus in the capital: American imperium is no longer a normative
question, much less an empirical one. The answers now seem clear:
Why fight wars to safeguard America's sole superpower status in
the future? Because that is the proper order of things. Why launch
a crusade to "democratize" the authoritarian Arab world?
Because we can.
This consensus
belies what Kagan called the "myth of (America's) Edenic
innocence," to which some on the left, and the traditional
right, cling. The US has long been an empire afraid to speak its
name. As Ferguson noted, the steady transfer of funds and foreign
policy functions to the Pentagon is a classic sign of a republic
losing its republican identity. What is left is for Americans,
who like to consider themselves anti-colonial pioneers, to learn
to love empire. First, the word must lose its pejorative connotations.
A cultural
historian might argue that the very occurrence of the AEI event,
together with the volumes about empire filling American bookstores,
demonstrates that this process is well underway. Ostensibly neutral
in the debate, AEI seemed to tip its hand by concluding the proceedings
with music from "The Empire Strikes Back." And in fact
the speakers' dispute over the term "imperial" reached
its denouement when they concurred that Lenin and British historian
John Hobson had ruined a perfectly good concept by attaching the
suffix "ism" to it.
Nor did the
hosts' open minds embrace substantive dissent. Shortly before
the debate began, AEI staff summoned police to expel two presumed
infiltrators from the ranks of the protesters outside. Defending
the action, an AEI spokeswoman told the Washington Post that the
protesters were responsible for an overflowed toilet in the "stink
tank" suite. As the blue-uniformed centurion removed one
protester from the room, she appealed to the crowd to protect
her free speech from this preemptive strike. No one said a word.
(Chris Toensing
is editor of Middle East Report in Washington. He wrote
this commentary for The Daily Star.)
