Posted on 01/05/2003 9:17:27 AM PST by Pokey78
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."
Yet others say that it is precisely Washington's unbalanced preoccupation with 9/11 and the war against terrorism that has muddied its strategic vision. For example, the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer holds that efforts to achieve Pax Americana, whether for altruistic or selfish reasons, will only weaken the United States in the great-power competition that will inevitably resume. Similarly, Charles Kupchan, who teaches international relations at Georgetown University and who served on Clinton's National Security Council, argues in his new book, The End of the American Era, that America is squandering this rare "unipolar moment" by rattling its saber and appearing to go it alone in pursuit of its international objectives. What it should be doing, says Kupchan, is just the opposite: shoring up alliances, working through international organizations, building a global regime of agreements and laws governing everything from trade to environmental policies. That alone will guarantee the persistence of an orderly, open world when other powers, namely a unified Europe, come to rival American power.
Empire, schmempire. Others scoff at even the notion of imperial ambition, pointing to the role of the American public that must support and foot the bill for any grand foreign-policy schemes. Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe, for example, argues that Americans ultimately will resist an American empire, "not because we are humanitarians and internationalists but because we are stingy with our government and lack genuine interest in the rest of the world."
So many views, so little consensus. But in fact it's always been this way in American politics. Whenever forced to deal with the larger world, Americans unfailingly consult their most cherished political ideals for guiding principles. Yet their readings of those ideals yield varying and sometimes conflicting conclusions. As University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall writes in his book Promised Land, Crusader State, "confusion and discord have been the norm in American foreign relations not because we lack principles to guide us, but because we have canonized so many diplomatic principles since 1776 that we are pulled every which way at once."
Whether or not this is an "imperial moment," it is certainly a moment of reckoning. And at the heart of the discussion is the Bush Doctrine. Laid out last September and elaborated in subsequent speeches and directives, the doctrine raises fundamental foreign-policy questions: Does this strategy represent a fundamental break with the basic principles of the American diplomatic tradition? Or is it instead a creative application of those principles to the challenge of being the sole superpower in the world? Answers are murky because the world today is largely compatible with America's values, but it also contains–as the demolition of the World Trade Center showed–shadowy insurgencies and rogue states violently opposed to Pax Americana. And in either case, are the wordsempireand imperialism accurate in describing what America is up to?
McDougall describes two overarching visions of American foreign policy that vie for dominance today. The first, which dominated in the 19th century, is the vision of America as Promised Land. Modest and restrained, it embraces four broad principles: In addition to an aversion to entangling alliances, the Monroe Doctrine, and the notion of Manifest Destiny, this vision emphasized American exceptionalism in the world at large.
However, at the turn of the last century, there emerged an alternative–and, in McDougall's mind, less prudent–vision: America as Crusader State. It found expression in the ideas of progressive imperialism, liberal internationalism, containment, and assorted programs of foreign aid and development.
Foreign policy ideas rise and fall in popularity, come back to life, and commingle with others over time. But the recurring debates over American grand strategy–including the Bush Doctrine–can all be connected to the eight strands that McDougall identifies:
Exceptionalism. Americans have never been more unanimous than the founders were in their belief that America had a special place in the world. Even such rivals as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson–who disagreed about almost everything else–could concur that America was the "City on the Hill" and that its people were blessed with civil and religious liberty. They also shared the conviction that their nation might one day grow into what Jefferson called an "empire for liberty." But it would not do so by force. Even such a visionary as Thomas Paine believed America would spread its values only by example. Perhaps the fullest elaboration of the policy implications of this conviction came in John Quincy Adams's Fourth of July speech in 1821: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own."
Unilateralism. The Founding Fathers were equally committed to unilateralism, a principled wariness about any obligations to other nations. The phrase "no entangling alliances" came from Jefferson's inaugural address, but the idea was first articulated in George Washington's farewell message: "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world . . . ," Washington declared, adding that the nation could prudently enter "temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." But extraordinary really had to be extraordinary. Indeed, when James Madison took the nation to war against Britain in 1812, he resisted the temptation to ally with France, which was then also fighting England.
The American system. Americans were understandably wary of European encroachments in the Americas. This concern for U.S. interests in the New Hemisphere gave rise to the principle of the American system, originating in James Monroe's address to Congress in 1823. The Monroe Doctrine, as it later came to be called, issued a clear and simple warning: no new colonies in the Americas. European powers, contending with independence movements in many of their Latin American colonies, generally heeded Monroe's warning. That was fortunate, because there is little proof that Americans would have put up much of a fight if Europeans had encroached. John Quincy Adams applauded the independence movement in South America but made it clear that "it is our true policy and duty to take no part in the contest." Monroe's was, in short, a modest and flexible doctrine, though it came to be seen as a warrant for the more aggressive notion of Manifest Destiny.
Expansionism. The 19th-century journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase "manifest destiny" in an 1839 article. It conveyed the belief in the divinely conferred right of the republic to expand westward and bring more of the continent into "the great experiment of Liberty and federated self-government." But Americans had been acting upon that conviction much earlier, starting with their insistence that Britain cede all lands east of the Mississippi at the end of the Revolutionary War. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and Jefferson's 1803 Louisiana Purchase confirmed that expansionist ambition. President James Polk saw Manifest Destiny as clear justification of the war he provoked with Mexico (1846-48). That struggle secured favorable borders for the new state of Texas and wrested California and much of the southwest from a defeated Mexico, but it also elicited an unprecedented wave of criticism from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other writers of the day. The spread of slavery into the new territories was certainly a great concern, but another was the conviction that imperial acquisitions violated the spirit of the nation's republican ideals.
Progressive imperialism. Had those luminaries lived until 1898, they would have seen their worst fears confirmed. In seizing foreign lands, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and other progressive imperialists proved to be unique in American history. But in their blend of self-interested pragmatism and idealism, these men, Zimmermann says, "set the course for American foreign policy for a century." The little-remembered naval officer and writer Alfred Mahan gave strategic shape to the progressives' vision. He firmly believed that island outposts in the Caribbean and the Pacific and a canal through Central America were essential to linking the two coasts of the continental nation and to establishing and protecting sea lanes for the emerging world power. With them, America could project its muscle abroad and become an even more confident player in the markets of the world. But just as important to this religious moralist, command of the seas would allow Western–and particularly Christian–civilization to extend its influence to "ancient and different civilizations." Roosevelt expressed the soaring idealism of his cohort with characteristically muscular prose: "Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose."
Liberal internationalism. President Woodrow Wilson carried idealism a step further by breaking with George Washington's prime dictum against entangling alliances. He announced in a 1916 address that the "United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objects [peace, national self-determination] and make them safe against violation . . . ." The story of his failure to bring the United States into the League of Nations is well known: Unyielding self-righteousness and arrogance prevented him from compromising with key Republican politicians, including Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who did not want to limit U.S. sovereignty. Insisting that only Congress could send the U.S. military into war, Lodge and others proposed modifications to the charter. Wilson's disastrous refusal to bend would later serve as a cautionary lesson to Franklin Roosevelt. Working with politicians from both parties, FDR saw to it that the United Nations charter included a mechanism for limiting the will of the majority: the Security Council, any of whose permanent members could veto a war resolution. Roosevelt succeeded where Wilson had failed by tempering idealism with realism, unilateralism with multilateralism.
Containment. The post-World War II reality soon compelled American statesmen and politicians to think beyond the vision of benign multilateral cooperation. Joseph Stalin made it clear in a 1946 speech that there could be no real cooperation between capitalist and communist nations. In the same year, Winston Churchill warned about an "iron curtain" descending across Europe, while diplomat George F. Kennan sent in his famous "long telegram," which warned of the Kremlin's "neurotic view of world affairs" and its determination to destroy "our traditional way of life" to secure Soviet supremacy. Kennan's later article for Foreign Affairs, signed "X," called for "firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." Other warnings and Soviet actions led to the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Thanks to his masterful salesmanship, Harry Truman managed, as Kupchan writes, "to galvanize the support of the public behind economic aid, re-armament, and the formation of the alliance network needed to contain communism." In 1950, Kennan's successor as head of the State Department's policy planning staff, Paul Nitze, called for a massive buildup of U.S. military might. With the Korean War underway, Congress responded by quadrupling the defense budget. Containment would undergo many modifications until the collapse of the Soviet empire, as it continues to do today in American policies against rogue states and terrorists.
Global meliorism. McDougall's ungainly phrase encompasses a range of policies, all connected with doing good works abroad and generally making the world a better place to live. Such policies had been occasionally implemented even before the middle of the 20th century. For instance, the Herbert Hoover-directed War Food and American Relief administrations brought necessities to Belgium and other European nations during and after World War I. But foreign aid and development efforts took off as World War II ended, with Roosevelt championing the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to help pay for postwar reconstruction. After the war, Truman's $13 billion Marshall Plan spurred Europe's miraculous economic recovery and created the momentum for its growing integration. Just as important, the plan served as a model of what aid and democracy building might achieve. Critics, including Henry Kissinger, voiced their skepticism that big government-to-government aid would lead other nations to democracy, but assistance became an arm of the struggle against communism. The huge but ultimately failed experiment in "nation-building" in Vietnam dealt a stinging, though not fatal, blow to the confidence of the meliorists. In varying degrees, Washington supported improvement efforts up to and through the end of the Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a growing faith that the spread of free markets and democracy would occur almost inevitably. The odd rogue state would have to be restrained, as the first President Bush made clear in the Gulf War; and military muscle might be needed to back humanitarian interventions when ethnic conflict flared, as President Clinton showed in Bosnia and Kosovo. Otherwise, it was believed, the road to a new world order needed little maintenance. "We clearly have it within our means . . . to lift billions and billions of people around the world into the global middle class," Clinton declared in 1998.
But that "end of history" confidence came close to collapsing with the twin towers on September 11. The "what did we do wrong?" crowd pointed to America's excessive and inflammatory influence in the world–or to its failure to use it in the right way, as in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Others charged that we had become the world's single superpower without any vision of what to do with our might.
A handful of foreign-policy experts have no qualms about using the "E" word in the current debate. Gaddis, for example, says: "We are now even more so an empire, definitely an empire, but we now also have a role." That role did not become immediately clear, in his view, until after 9/11. There was some undiplomatic stumbling when some in the administration behaved, he says, "like sullen teenagers" and used language imprecisely, as in the "axis of evil." But things changed last September, Gaddis contends, with Bush's U.N. speech on Iraq and the presentation of his National Security Strategy–the core document of the Bush Doctrine– to Congress.
One thing remarkable about that security statement, as many have noted, was that its authors–the president himself, Rice, and other contributors from inside and outside government–took it very seriously. "It's important as a reflection of where we are," says Richard Haass, head of the policy planning staff at the State Department. "The president read the document line by line," says University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow, who contributed ideas to the doctrine. "He took personal ownership of it." That has not been the case with most such documents ever since they were mandated by Congress in 1986. According to some insiders, many of them were bottom-up documents that bore little resemblance to the thinking of key administration officials, let alone that of the president. They were usually perfunctory laundry lists that were produced late and were sometimes obsolete by the time they arrived. What concentrated the minds of the Bush team, Rice contends, "was the long-standing call for the United States to develop a comprehensive strategy that finally spoke to the challenges of the post-Cold War era." And precisely because Bush's security strategy was developed in response to a specific threat, claims one of its champions, Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, it "could be said to bear some resemblance to America's last grand strategy, 'containment,' which likewise developed more in practice than in abstraction."
Perhaps inevitably, the element of the doctrine that was seized upon by the media and other commentators was the one that dealt most specifically with the threat represented by the events of 9/11: pre-emption. Administration critics fixed on it as proof of arrogant, high-handed, even lawless unilateralism. The nuanced development of the principle in the security strategy suggests that it is none of those. Its contention is that international law has long recognized that "nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack." What must be done, says the doctrine, is to "adapt the concept of imminent threat" to the capabilities of today's most likely adversaries: not other great powers but rogue states and terrorists, who conceal their weapons, deliver them covertly, and target civilian noncombatants. But the doctrine also clarifies that the United States will not always use force, that it will improve intelligence gathering to establish proof, and that it will consult with allies. "The reason for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just," the doctrine asserts.
More ambitious than pre-emption is the sometimes overlooked assertion that the United States will remain powerful enough to keep potential adversaries from a military buildup that would surpass or equal the power of the United States. Reflecting the thinking of Wolfowitz, who proposed elevating the same principle to doctrine after the Gulf War in the first Bush administration, the idea goes beyond pre-emption to something like prevention. Critics charge that this effectively cancels the doctrines of containment and deterrence, though the Bush Doctrine says that it does not. And in the current flare-up of tensions with North Korea, Secretary of State Colin Powell has indicated that the United States will rely on containment. The notion of prevention does, however, tie in with the doctrine's assertion that the age of great-power rivalries is over: It is a warning against any unfriendly would-be rival to America's unipolar supremacy.
Some critics argue that the Bush Doctrine is naive in suggesting that the age of great power rivalries is over, but on this point Rice is unyielding: "I think it is hard to make an argument that the future we face includes the kind of great power rivalries that we saw from the 17th century to the 20th century, which led to war and efforts to redraw the map. It's a wonderful academic debate, but I would have to say that if you look where the threats are–the spread of weapons of mass destruction, irresponsible states, the threat of extremism–the great powers have a great deal of common interest in confronting those trends."
But does the assertion of American pre-eminence represent the abandonment of multilateralism? Again, the doctrine would suggest not. It is replete with affirmations of the importance of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and other alliances. But this multilateralism is definitely of the FDR variety and not of the Woodrow Wilson strain: It embraces cooperation without the loss of sovereignty. It will not sign on to all international agreements or wait for international bodies to take action on urgent matters, such as the threat of Iraq. Indeed, says a senior administration official, "Iraq is now an example of what happens when the United States puts something on the agenda and then brings the rest of the world to that position by, in this case, reinvigorating the most important multilateral institution, which is the [U.N.] Security Council."
In addition to identifying the key threats of our time, the strategic means of responding to them, and the importance of great-power cooperation, the Bush Doctrine contains another central element that until recently received little attention: a commitment to extending peace by "encouraging free and open societies on every continent." The Bush team knew that this salient point would be overshadowed by debates over preemption and charges of naked unilateralism. Some members even resisted bringing up the preemption principle for that reason. But in recent weeks, with Haass speaking in public forums on democracy promotion in the Islamic world and Powell talking about development projects in the Middle East, this aspect of the doctrine is beginning to receive more attention. And, of course, more criticism as well. Some say that it smacks of the "goo-goo idealism" of Wilson; others, that it chauvinistically asserts the universality of liberal values. Indeed, in an age given over to value relativism, the latter may be the most radical aspect of the doctrine. As Haass affirmed in his recent address to the Council on Foreign Relations, the administration does not view the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as "just lifestyles America thinks it ought to export." Nor is this simply posturing. Haass concedes that the United States had for too long turned a blind eye on Middle Eastern regimes that have suppressed those rights. While that might have been justifiable as geopolitical jockeying during the Cold War, he says, it no longer is.
Finally, though, is imperialist the right word for describing the objectives set out in the Bush Doctrine? Is empire the right word for America? Even though a historian like Gaddis finds it apt, others are deeply troubled by the usage, including Bush himself. "We have no territorial ambitions," he said in a speech last Veterans Day. "We don't seek an empire."
Many scholars object to the word for sound historical reasons. "In an empire, you control other nations, you write their laws, and so on," says Zelikow. "Even in the case of an informal empire, such as Britain over Afghanistan, you have something completely different from what the United States is doing."
Zelikow explains that a special vocabulary of empire be- gan to develop around the time of the Boer War at the turn of the last century. It was adapted by the defeated nations of World War I to describe the victors. Marxists of the Russian and Chinese persuasion perfected the word's vagueness in order to paint all capitalist powers as imperialists. "Over the last generation," Zelikow says, "people have come to describe any nation with influence over another as an em-pire. It doesn't tell you anything, but it brings a lot of bag- gage with it."
A country that produces nearly a third of the world's gross domestic product and whose military spending tops that of the next 20 countries combined is capable, obviously, of exerting wide influence through both soft power (including everything from MTV to McDonald's) and hard military muscle. But so far, the United States has seldom–with the exception of 1898–demonstrated that it wants to directly dominate the internal affairs of other nations. This does not mean that America has not engaged in some heavy-handed meddling with other nations' governments: Throughout the Cold War, for instance, Washington helped bring about "regime change" in Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and other nations as part of its larger strategy to contain and roll back the communist tide. In the years between the fall of the Soviet empire and September 11, a period that columnist Krauthammer first dubbed the "unipolar moment," Americans demonstrated that they had little idea of what to do with their massive power, apart from marveling at it while the "new economy" soared skyward. At most, under Clinton and Bush before him, the United States acted like the benign but barely attentive custodian of globalism. Now, however, it knows that peace, prosperity, and the spread of human rights are not automatically guaranteed. Their survival will require the expenditure of American will and might. But Americans will have to decide in the long run whether they want to extend the unipolar moment into what Krauthammer recently proposed as the "unipolar era."
Overly ambitious? Rice throws the question right back: "Was it overly ambitious of the United States to believe that democracy could be fostered in Japan and that peace could finally be brought between Germany and France? It succeeded because it proceeded from values that Americans understood. Truman and his team understood that America could not afford to leave a vacuum in the world." The question, of course, is can it now?
Assuming this is true, which by all evidence it is, the only thing you need to do to keep the U.S. military out of your back yard would be to run a stable, open, peaceful government that doesn't seek to directly or indirectly harm others. The word 'empire' is merely used to generate fear of us and our power, regardless of the fact that it only comes to bear in circumstances that would seem historcially absurd: humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, and defensive wars.
While I understand the apprehension that a lot of the world must feel, they give little thought to what would happen had the Germans, Soviets, or Chinese risen to global dominance. Who would they prefer?
There was some undiplomatic stumbling when some in the administration behaved, he says, "like sullen teenagers" and used language imprecisely, as in the "axis of evil."
That is still a masterful use of diplomatic hardball, despite the squeals of protest it brings from more sophisticated circles. Calling a spade a spade is the bane of more refined diplomacy, but the best way to handle a bully. Smugly convinced that he is a reckless cowboy, some just can't see Bush for the shrewd poker player he is.
Rice throws the question right back: "Was it overly ambitious of the United States to believe that democracy could be fostered in Japan and that peace could finally be brought between Germany and France?
Precisely. Many people at the time felt that Germany was too prone to war, and Japan to foriegn, for the liberal, peaceful ideas of democracy and capitalism to take root. The slow march from despotism to peaceful self-rule continues across the world, and in places where it stumbles and falls, such as the Weimar republic, it must helped back onto the path. In a world where the most powerful weapons are within the grasp of the most brutal of tyrants, the time to let everyone figure things out in their own schedule is past.
The theory that we can creat "democracy" out of a thin air in in a religiously/ethnically fragmented hell hole like Iraq is a utopian, futile, and dangerous fairy tale
Put another way, Japan had the skills for modernity, but not the social context for it. Iraq was perhaps less skilled, but also less extreme than the Japanese.
While there is a strong three way pull in the ethinic makeup of Iraq, a well designed federal republic could give power and autonomy to these, while keeping them intact. Of anywhere in the Middle East, save Iran, I would think that Iraq has the best chance of developing into a modern state. It may be overly optimistic to imagine them as a liberal Western democracy, but there are great strides we can make there to stabilize the region and provide an example for their neighbors.
The road to democracy will be long, but the groundwork can be set up now.
Iraq (pre-1979) was a poor example indeed of the potentialities of the Arab Democracy (after all Saddam's brutal Bathists started as a mass movement from below). Since the merciless and violent assassination of the King, his family and his advisors in 1957, it endured a succession of vicious dicators.
As to Iran, we agree that it probably has the best chance to emerge as a democracy (because of a common history, sense of shared nationhood, and recent secular tradition)...though I don't think it will happen anytime soon.
You are leaping in the dark my friend in believing in the chimera of Iraq democracy and and those that leap with you are asking for decades of woe (at U.S. taxpayers expense).
Initially, their freedom will not be as far reaching as it should. They will have to maintain approval of their American patrons, and many laws, organizations and ways of doing buisiness will simply have to be imposed. Handing them the reins too early would be asking for disaster.
That having been said, Iraq does have a lot going for it. A responsible use of their oil revenues will fix their infrastructure in little time, and our guidance in their educational system will ensure that Iraq will not become a hotbed of madrassa fanaticsm.
I think that we can succeed if we keep our sights focused on making two small changes.
The first would be preparing long term changes in Iraqi culture, government, and national identity.
The second would be to influence neighboring countries with a positive example of benign modernization.
A long, dirty job, to be sure, be we are faced with few alternatives than to enforce what cannot be influenced.
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