The New American Empire?
Americans have an enduring aversion to planting the flag on foreign soil. Is that attitude changing?
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 began 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 empire. It doesn't tell you anything, but it brings a lot of baggage 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?
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