The New American Empire?
Americans have an enduring aversion to planting the flag on foreign soil. Is that attitude changing?
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 words empire and 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.
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