No, I don't think it's revisionism - the reality was complicated and involved good measures of force, co-option, and willingness mixed together. Empires can be formed by force alone, but they cannot last by force alone. The British Empire and the Roman lasted longer than the Third Reich or the Soviet Empire, and one of the reasons was that they brought benefits as well as compunction. "Civis Romanus sum" - which the later Empire wisely extended to many non-Latins, was for a long time a magic spell to conjure with.
How do you fit the British opium trade, for example, into your fantasy of the benevolent hegemon?
By looking at it with the eyes of 1840, not 2003. The British wanted to sell to the Chinese a commodity which the Chinese wanted to buy, and which btw the British themselves bought in large amounts, and the Mandarins prevented it. Thus a trade war by force. Decrying the whole business as "drug dealing" is anachronistic; the British used opium widely (in tincture form) and the mechanism of addiction was not clearly understood in 1840.
I find it odd that people so eager to support democracy on a national scale are also eager to insist that order on a global scale can only be maintained by the unchecked exercise of unaccountable power. That hardly seems consistent with American principles
Accountability is indeed the main point. The UN doesn't have any, the EU is scarcely better. Show an international body that meets the test of representation and accountability to the governed, the American people will feel differently. |
