Posted on 03/31/2002 11:11:01 AM PST by Torie
March 31, 2002
All Roads Lead to D.C. By EMILY EAKIN
The Associated Press Emperor Commodus receiving homage in ancient Rome, as imagined in a scene from the movie "Gladiator."
STRUGGLING to get a handle on American foreign policy? For starters, try dusting off your Livy and boning up on the Second Punic War. Or dip into a good history of 19th-century Britain, paying close attention to those dazzling military campaigns in the Middle East — the Battle of Omdurman, say, or the Second Afghan War.
Today, America is no mere superpower or hegemon but a full-blown empire in the Roman and British sense. That, at any rate, is the consensus of some of the nation's most notable commentators and scholars.
"People are now coming out of the closet on the word empire," said the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."
Americans are used to being told — typically by resentful foreigners — that they're imperialists. But lately some of the nation's own eminent thinkers are embracing the idea. More astonishing, they are using the term with approval. From the isolationist right to the imperialist-bashing left, a growing number of experts are issuing stirring paeans to American empire.
The Weekly Standard kicked off the parade early last fall with "The Case for American Empire," by The Wall Street Journal's editorial features editor, Max Boot. Quoting the title of Patrick Buchanan's last book, "America, A Republic, not an Empire," Mr. Boot said, "This analysis is exactly backward: the September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation."
Calling for the military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Boot cited the stabilizing effect of 19th-century British rule in the region. "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today," he wrote, "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodphurs and pith helmets."
Since then, the empire idea has caught on. In January, Charles H. Fairbanks, a foreign policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, told an audience at Michigan State University that America was "an empire in formation." Last month, a Yale University professor, Paul Kennedy — who 10 years ago was predicting America's ruin from imperial overreach — went further.
"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power," Mr. Kennedy wrote in The Financial Times of London. "The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain's army was much smaller than European armies and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies — right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy. Napoleon's France and Philip II's Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne's empire was merely western European in its stretch. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is no comparison."
The most extended statement from the empire camp to date is "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos" (Random House, 2001), a recent book by the journalist Robert D. Kaplan.
Arguing that "times have changed less than we think," Mr. Kaplan suggests the nation's leaders turn to ancient Greek and Roman chroniclers — as well as Winston Churchill's 1899 account of the British conquest of the Sudan — for helpful hints about how to navigate today's world. He devotes a chapter to the Second Punic War ("Rome's victory in the Second Punic War, like America's in World War II, made it a universal power") and one to the cunning Emperor Tiberius. Granted, the emperor was something of a despot, writes Mr. Kaplan. Still, he "combined diplomacy with the threat of force to preserve a peace that was favorable to Rome."
IF that sounds familiar, you've got the right idea. "Our future leaders could do worse than be praised for their tenacity, their penetrating intellects and their ability to bring prosperity to distant parts of the world under America's soft imperial influence," Mr. Kaplan writes. "The more successful our foreign policy, the more leverage America will have in the world. Thus, the more likely that future historians will look back on 21st-century United States as an empire as well as a republic, however different from that of Rome and every other empire throughout history."
Classicists may scoff at the idea that democratic America has much in common with the tyrannical Rome of Augustus or Nero. But the empire camp points out that however unlikely the comparison, America has often behaved like a conquering empire. As Mr. Kennedy put it, "From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation."
America's imperial behavior continues today. "The United States has bases or base rights in 40 countries," he said. "In the assault on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, they moved warships from Britain, Japan, Germany, Southern Spain and Italy. So while Joe Public might say we are not like those old empires — and we resent being called an empire — the actual effect of the projection of American power is not unlike the effect of the projection of Victorian power or Roman power."
Today, the empire scholars acknowledge that America tends to operate not through brute force but through economic, cultural and political means. The idea seems to be that it is easier to turn other people into Americans than for Americans to make war on them.
"We are an attractive empire, the one everyone wants to join," Mr. Boot said.
And that, empire enthusiasts say, is the reason to root for a Pax Americana. In an anarchic world, with rogue states and terrorist cells, a globally dominant United States offers the best hope for peace and stability, they argue.
"There's a positive side to empire," Mr. Kaplan said. It's in some ways the most benign form of order."
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I also agree with the nocomad that American commitments require a distinctive kind of diplomacy. Tyrants are never really going to be our friends. But I don't know that we have a model for something different from Wilsonian imposition of political correctness on strange cultures and unrealistic "realism" which denies that moral and political principles are factors in the "real world." Reagan had a feel for the answer, so does Bush when he cuts loose and shocks Foggy Bottom, but we don't have a theory for it.
I don't despise the British Empire by any means, but what America is now and should aim at being good at is something different from empire. We aren't interested in taking territorial possessions around the globe, governing overseas populations directly, or establishing American populations in distant colonies.
We want first of all to defend ourselves from attack, and that simply requires involvement all over the world. We have become too big a target to do otherwise, and could only stop being a target by accepting far less opportunity and prosperity for the American people.
But the genuinely "realist" perception is that American freedom will never be secure in a world otherwise dominated by tyrants. And so we have an interest in the spread of freedom and the things that make it possible: the rule of law, free circulation of political opinion, governments which have to answer to their people, etc. Free markets are part of it too - people forget that Adam Smith used to be celebrated as a great contributor to world peace, because he discovered that war and conquest were not the only or even best avenues to national prosperity.
That doesn't mean outlawing smoking in Kabul, which I'm sure the Gore Administration would have tried. It does mean some kind of Minimum Decency Rule (to quote the sainted R. A. Lafferty) towards which we should be always pushing our allies and enemies alike. But the whole thing needs more thought among non-isolationist conservatives.
And the closer you get, the nicer the roads are. Coincidence I'm sure.
Southside has gotten all the road money for decades. They continue to get it.
"The Liberty Doctrine" by Michael MacFaul and Steven Menashi's review of Kaplan's Warrior Politics.
Signs at least that the right questions are being thought about.
Stanley Kurtz's review of Bernard Lewis in this Policy Review is good too, though not on this theme.
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