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