Seattle Times
Editorials & Opinion: Sunday, June 29, 2003
Guest columnist
American Empire: Conservatives ask, is this abuse of power?
By Clyde Prestowitz
Knight Ridder Newspapers
In perhaps America's best-known sermon, Gov. John Winthrop compared his Massachusetts Bay colony to the biblical New Jerusalem — the perfect place that would one day replace the imperfect world. In his vision, the land that would become America would be a beacon to the world by its example. Today, however, we Americans must ask whether we want our country to evolve into that city on a hill — or into a new Rome.
Even before the recent war in Iraq, I found myself facing that question. At October's meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders in Mexico, several hundred business people and the presidents and prime ministers of some of the world's major powers were seated in a great hall awaiting dinner. Mexicans tend to eat late, and by 10 p.m., the salad had not yet been served. Many of the older leaders were obviously suffering from jet lag.
President Bush, however, had the advantage of relative youth and the short flight from his Texas ranch. Nevertheless, as the pre-dinner entertainment dragged on, the famously early-to-bed U.S. leader walked out. The host, Mexican President Vicente Fox, had been forewarned, but the businessmen had not.<font color=red> One leaned over to ask me: "Who does Bush think he is? The emperor?"<font color=black>
Bush would, no doubt, be startled by the question, as I was. America was born in a revolt against empires and their trappings. Europeans, Chinese and Japanese do empires, not Americans. Just compare Washington to other capitals. It has no Forbidden City, no Buckingham Palace. It was not conceived as the center of an empire.
Yet a glance at America's power and reach, its relations with other countries, and the development of its strategic doctrine over the years shows a distinct move toward the pursuit of empire. Although many are attributing this to the recent strong influence of Republican neoconservatives, who preach the need to use U.S. power unilaterally, the truth is that this trend has been developing for some time and Sept. 11 merely accelerated the pace.
<font color=red>As a conservative and former high official of the Reagan administration, I find both the drift toward empire and its acceleration troubling.<font color=black> As the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke said of imperial Britain: "I dread our being too much dreaded."
Indeed, as Burke suggests, empire is not conservatism. It is radicalism, egotism and adventurism cloaked in the stirring rhetoric of traditional patriotism.
The United States, of course, looks nothing like ancient Rome or imperial Britain. Strictly speaking, America has no colonies and, as our leaders commonly assert, no territorial ambitions. Yet in 2002, U.S. defense spending accounted for more than 40 percent of the global total, and it is rising rapidly in both absolute and percentage terms. Next year, it will exceed the combined defense spending of the European Union, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.
U.S. forces are stationed at more than 700 installations around the globe, with 120,000 soldiers in Europe, 90,000 in East Asia and the Pacific, nearly 200,000 in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, and 15,000 in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States.
Nor is U.S. influence and control limited to military matters. During Asia's 1997 financial crisis, Japan tried to mount an independent rescue operation for the nations of Southeast Asia, but was stopped cold by opposition from the U.S. Treasury Department. And former Indonesian leader Suharto, installed in the 1960s with U.S. assistance, was ousted with American backing in 1998.
Indeed, what Irving Kristol says about Europe holds for many other countries. Kristol, a founder of the neoconservative movement, argues that no European country can really have its own foreign policy because they all need the United States too much: "They are dependent nations, though they have a very large measure of local autonomy."
While the reach of U.S. power is definitely new, the sentiment that drives it is as old as this country. From the beginning, Americans saw themselves as a chosen people laboring in God's vineyard to create a new, more perfect society. "American exceptionalism" has often been a source of profound irritation to non-Americans, implying that America is better than other countries.
<font color=red>But because we believe every human being is a potential American, and that his or her present national or cultural affiliations are an unfortunate but reversible accident, we have more than once been blind to our own ambitions. When U.S. leaders promise to spread freedom globally, what they mean is Americanism.<font color=black>
In preaching this doctrine, America has veered between seeing itself as the New Jerusalem that teaches through precept and example and the New Rome that makes right with might. While our Puritan forebears labored to build the city on a hill, the 19th-century apostles of Manifest Destiny did not hesitate to sweep away the American Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards and any others they saw as obstructing the spread of the universal values of Americanism.
That's how the Philippines, for instance, ended up as a U.S. colony for more than three decades. After the United States won the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Filipinos — who had been under Spanish rule — declared independence. But President McKinley decided that wouldn't work: "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift, and civilize and Christianize them."
During the 20th century, the pendulum swung back. Emerging after two world wars as the dominant power — one that could establish its dominion wherever it wished — America chose to limit its power. U.S. leaders opted to work through alliances and create multilateral institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, adopting a Cold War strategy of containment rather than conquest.
Etienne Davignon, a European elder statesman and longtime friend of the United States, recently put it this way: "After World War II you were all-powerful, relatively even more powerful than you are now. Yet you chose to make your power safe for the world by enmeshing it in multilateral institutions and defining your own national interest in terms of the interests of other nations."
The United States surely used its power to influence those multilateral organizations and was their most important member, but it sought to act on the basis of consultation and persuasion. <font color=red>For the most part, the country kept its powder dry; one notable exception was the Vietnam War.<font color=black> It chose, instead, to evangelize by example, and in doing so won the Cold War. Perhaps the term "soft empire" best describes this state of affairs.
But over time, we got hooked on our own power, and other countries got hooked on our protection and the money they could save by it. We continued to bear more responsibility, and others assumed a kind of client-state attitude.
<font color=red>The end of the Cold War in 1992 provided a chance to rethink the global system.<font color=black>
Unfortunately, we didn't take that opportunity. We scaled down our military a bit, but we essentially kept the system of American hegemony and "soft empire" in place — and started to drift toward greater unilateralism.
While we pursued policies of global economic integration, we began, even under President Clinton, to resist a number of international treaties, from the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention to a nearly universally adopted ban on land mines. With the threat from the Soviets gone, the United States seemed less willing to work with allies if cooperating meant limiting America's freedom of action in any way.
<font color=red>In the wake of Sept. 11, however, America appears to be on a new course toward "hard empire." At West Point last June, President Bush announced the new U.S. doctrine of "pre-emptive and preventive war" under which the United States "will not hesitate to act alone" and, if necessary, defend itself by "acting pre-emptively."
This doctrine emphasized that our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States. With these government pronouncements came a flood of commentary from neoconservative writers extolling the virtues of the unilateral exercise of American power.<font color=black>
The recent war with Iraq and its aftermath represent the debut of this new doctrine and strategy. Working outside formal alliances with a coalition of the willing and the opportunistic based on the alleged threat of weapons of mass destruction, the United States launched a preventive, pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein.
The results appear mixed. No one can mourn the passing of this brutal thug. We should have gotten him in the 1991 Gulf War, and it's good we did now. But how we did has proven problematic and is likely to become more so.
<font color=red>It seems clear in retrospect that there was no immediate threat to the United States from weapons of mass destruction. This implies U.S. intelligence was faulty or manipulated to justify an attack that had already been planned for other, unstated reasons. It is also clear that U.S. planning for the war's aftermath was inadequate and based on a faulty assessment of the dynamics of Iraqi society and behavior.<font color=black>
In the euphoria of victory, none of this has raised serious questions at home, but in the rest of the world, U.S. credibility has been badly damaged, while suspicions that the war was really all about taking Iraq's oil and protecting Israel have been (mistakenly in my view) confirmed.
<font color=red>In my view, the administration was primarily trying to unequivocally demonstrate America's might as a way of bringing nations who support terrorism into line. But American insistence on controlling Iraq's oil after the war, severely restricting U.N. involvement in rebuilding the country and "punishing" Canada, Mexico, Chile and uber-villain France for not supporting the war only add to the perception abroad of America as a rogue nation that might find a pretext to turn on any country at any time.<font color=black>
Power is a magnet for threats. Gov. Winthrop saw a "city upon a hill" as attractive by dint of its virtue, not its power, or rather that its power flowed from its virtue. John Quincy Adams urged we "not go abroad in search of monsters to slay." Those are good conservative guides for America's future.
Clyde Prestowitz's new book, "Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions," has just been published by Basic Books. Prestowitz is a former U.S. trade negotiator and was counselor to the secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration. He wrote this article for the San Jose Mercury News. |
