In my days as a student activist in the 1970s, the term "imperialism" only turned up in the American political debate as part of a critique of U.S. policy by someone in the anti-war or international solidarity movements, or in the writings of left-wing academics or members of small socialist splinter groups. So you can imagine my surprise, thirty years later, to see the notions of imperialism and American empire gaining a degree of mainstream respectability, this time promoted by a strange convergence of right-wing unilateralists and liberal "humanitarian interventionists" who see unbridled American power as the last, best hope for building a more stable world.

The most recent case in point was the glaring red, white and blue cover story in the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, "American Empire (Get Used to It)." In a provocative essay that masquerades as a realist critique, longtime human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff suggests that Americans are in a sense of "deep denial" over their country's imperial role, and are therefore ill-equipped to understand the roots of our brave new post-9/11 world.

A number of Ignatieff's themes are picked up in Jay Tolson's January 13th cover story in U.S. News and World Report, "The American Empire: Is the U.S. Trying to Shape the World? Should It?," which asserts that in the wake of September 11th, the United States now 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."

For his part, Ignatieff sums up the nature of America's imperial "burden" as follows:

"Being an imperial power . . . is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century - Ottoman, British, and Soviet. In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones - Palestine and the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, to name but two - that have proved to be the nemeses of empires past."

To make a long story short, in Ignatieff's view, policing the globe is a tough job, but hey, somebody's got to do it, so it might as well be America. After all, if you take the Bush administration's national security strategy document at face value, the United States wants to be a selfless imperial overlord that seeks no advantage for itself, but is merely attempting to usher in an era of liberal democracy and free markets for all. Ignatieff accepts the administration's claim that its proposed war in Iraq is not about projecting U.S. power, or gaining leverage over global oil resources: it is, in his words, "the first in a series of struggles to contain the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the first attempt to shut off the potential supply of lethal technologies to a global terrorist network."

Never mind the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that Iraq has operational links to Al Qaeda, or that the most likely source of nuclear weapons or nuclear materials for global terrorist groups lies in Russia's vast, poorly guarded nuclear stockpiles, or that military force is a uniquely ineffective tool for stemming the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Ignatieff has bought into the Pentagon's self-serving notion of "wars of counter-proliferation," and he sees it as just one of the inevitable burdens of the American empire.

Why would a human rights advocate like Ignatieff want to embrace American imperialism? Because, he asserts, "there are many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power," from the Germans and Japanese in the aftermath of World War II to the Bosnians, Kosovars, Afghans, and "most inconveniently of all, the Iraqis," more recently. Ignatieff's roster of freedom conveniently overlooks the millions of people around the world - Guatemalans, Chileans, Brazilians, Indonesians, Iranians, and to some degree, even Afghans and Iraqis - who lost decades of potential freedom as a result of the actions of regimes armed, supported, and in many cases installed by the U.S. government.

And it is far from clear that the new, post-Cold War version of American interventionism will result in viable democracies in Afghanistan or Iraq, even as the Bush administration's choice of allies in its war on terrorism has led it to arm and aid a motley collection of undemocratic regimes from Djibouti to Uzbekistan. But analysts like Ignatieff, who are convinced that the slaughter in the Balkans would not have been stopped without U.S. intervention, are willing to give the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt in this new era.

While humanitarian interventionists like Michael Ignatieff may be jumping on the imperial bandwagon -- even as they temper their support by stressing the limits of American power and pressing for greater investment in "soft power" in the form of funds for diplomacy and foreign aid -- it is the unilateralists of the Republican right who got the bandwagon rolling in the first place. As the New York Times magazine noted in its "Year in Ideas" issue of December 9, 2001, under the heading "American Imperialism, Embraced," the most vocal advocates of a "new proud, American imperialism" in recent years have come from the ranks of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC was founded in 1997 to advocate a neo-Reaganite, "peace through strength" policy that stresses force and the threat of force over treaties and cooperation as the primary tool for projecting U.S. influence in the world.

Signers of PNAC's founding statement included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and other key members of the current Bush foreign policy team. Current key players in PNAC include neo-conservative hawks like Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, unilateralist ideologue Robert Kagan, and former Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson (who also helped draft the Republican foreign policy platform at their 2000 convention). In the run-up to the 2000 elections, PNAC published a 200-page plus report that advocated a far more muscular (and far more costly) U.S. national security strategy that included agenda items such as "regime change" in Iraq. So much for the idea that this was an idea dreamed up by Bush policymakers in the light of the nation's newfound sense of vulnerability after the 9/11 terror attacks.

If the debate over American empire was merely a passing fancy that happened to grab the attention of a few editors and headline writers, we could safely put it aside and get on with our lives. But if the provocative, "war without end" strategy set out in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy is carried out as outlined, it could present the single greatest threat to stability, democracy, and peace in this new century.

That doesn't mean America should sit on its hands in the face of human rights abuses, terrorist attacks, or the spread of nuclear weapons. It does mean that American power needs to be applied much more intelligently and cooperatively, in ways that strengthen international treaties like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty instead of undermining them; build up the capacities of the United Nations to prevent and contain conflict; and make a positive contribution to fighting threats to humanity, from terrorism to the scourges of AIDS, illiteracy, and malnutrition. Rather than the "smart-bomb imperium" that Jay Tolson refers to, the United States should be striving to be a responsible global power that works to build institutions and relationships that will render the use of military force a last resort rather than a first option in the world's ubiquitous trouble spots.

The choices for American policy aren't limited to imperialism versus isolationism, as Ignatieff and his strange bedfellows on the right seem to suggest. There is plenty of room between these two extremes for a policy of cooperative engagement that works to prevent violence and build sustainable societies. But this more constructive approach will require a deeper understanding of the limits of military power and unilateralist bluster in solving the most important problems facing the world today.

Just as Mark Twain and other prominent intellectuals spoke out against the imperial projects of Teddy Roosevelt's era, a new generation of analysts and advocates need to take a stand against the "new improved imperialism" implicit in the Bush administration's national security doctrine. Then, maybe some years down the road, we'll wake up to a magazine cover with the headline "American Empire: What Were We Thinking?"

Links:
Michael Ignatieff, "American Empire (Get Used to It)" New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003. (you might have to register or pay to view this article. Email me at berrigaf@newschool.edu to request that a word document version be sent to you).

Jay Tolson "The American Empire: Is the U.S. Trying to Shape the World? Should It?" U.S. News and World Report, January 13, 2003.

Project for a New American Century