Thomas E. Ricks :
©Washington Post, August 22, 2001
U.S. Urged to Embrace an 'Imperialist' Role, Worldwide Dominance Ignites
a Debate
WASHINGTON People who label the United States "imperialist"
usually mean it as an insult. But in recent years a handful of
conservative defense intellectuals have begun to argue that the
United States is indeed acting in an imperialist fashion - and that it
should embrace the role.
When the Cold War ended just over a decade ago, these thinkers
note, the United States actually expanded its global military
presence.
With the establishment over the last decade of a semi-permanent
presence of about 20,000 troops in the Gulf area, they contend,
the United States is now a major military power in almost every
region of the world - the Middle East, Europe, East Asia and the
Western Hemisphere.
And even though the United States is unlikely to fight a major war
anytime soon, they believe, it remains very active militarily around
the globe, keeping the peace in Bosnia and Kosovo, garrisoning
37,000 troops in South Korea, patrolling the skies of Iraq and
seeking to balance the rise of China.
The leading advocate of this idea of enforcing a new "Pax
Americana" is Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the
Project for the New American Century, a Washington research
institute that advocates a vigorous, expansionistic Reaganite
foreign policy.
In ways similar though not identical to the Roman and British
empires, he argues, the United States is an empire of democracy
or liberty - it is not conquering land or establishing colonies, but it
has a dominating global presence militarily, economically and
culturally.
In some ways, the quiet debate over an imperial role goes to the
basic question now facing makers of American foreign policy: Was
the military activism of President Bill Clinton - from invading Haiti
to keeping peace in Bosnia, missile attacks on Sudan and
Afghanistan, and bombing Yugoslavia - unique to his
administration, or was it characteristic of the post-Cold War era,
and so likely to be the shape of things to come?
The discussion of an American empire also helps illuminate the
running battle for the last six months between Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and his Joint Chiefs of Staff over how to change
the U.S. military. The defense secretary wants to prepare the
armed forces to deal with the threats of tomorrow and hints at
cutting conventional forces to pay for new capabilities such as
missile defense.
But the Joint Chiefs respond that they are quite busy with today's
missions.
Siding with the chiefs, Mr. Donnelly, a former journalist and
congressional aide, argues that "policing the American perimeter in
Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia will provide the main
mission for the U.S. armed forces for decades to come."
He contends that the Bush administration has tried to sidestep this
reality and instead is trying to formulate a more modest policy in
the tradition of the "realist" or balance-of-power views associated
with the Nixon era secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and Brent
Scowcroft, the national security adviser in several previous
Republican administrations.
The Kissinger course is mistaken, Mr. Donnelly says. He argues
that the sooner the U.S. government recognizes that it is managing
a new empire, the faster it can take steps to reshape its military,
and its foreign policy, to fit that mission.
Events of the last six months tend to support his argument: While
President George W. Bush and his advisers talked during the
presidential election campaign about withdrawing from
peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, once in office they
emphasized that they would not leave before European allies did,
and they also faced the prospect of becoming more involved in
another Balkan conflict, in Macedonia.
If Americans thought more clearly and openly about the necessity
of an imperial mission, Mr. Donnelly argues, "We'd better
understand the full range of tasks we want our military to do, from
the Balkans-like constabulary missions to the no-fly zones over
Iraq‚ to maintaining enough big-war capacity" to hedge against the
emergence of a major adversary.
Mr. Donnelly has few open supporters, even among
conservatives. But he said he believed that many people quietly
agree with him.
"There's not all that many people who will talk about it openly," he
said. "It's discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code
phrases like 'America is the sole superpower.'"
One of Mr. Donnelly's somewhat reluctant allies is Andrew
Bacevich, a retired army colonel who is a professor of
international relations at Boston University. Mr. Bacevich does not
much like the idea of an imperial America. But like it or not, he
says, it is what we have.
"I would prefer a nonimperial America," Mr. Bacevich said in an
e-mail interview. "Shorn of global responsibilities, a global military
and our preposterous expectations of remaking the world in our
image, we would, I think, have a much better chance of keeping
faith with the intentions and hopes of the Founders."
But Mr. Bacevich went on to dismiss that as wishful thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, he said, maintaining American power globally
already has become the unspoken basis of U.S. strategy.
"In all of American public life there is hardly a single prominent
figure who finds fault with the notion of the United States remaining
the world's sole military superpower until the end of time," he
wrote in the current issue of the National Interest, a conservative
foreign policy journal that has been the major venue of the imperial
debate.
So, Mr. Bacevich concluded, "the practical question is not
whether or not we will be a global hegemon - but what sort of
hegemon we'll be."
Until American policymakers candidly acknowledge that they are
playing an imperial role on the world stage, Mr. Donnelly and Mr.
Bacevich argue, U.S. strategy will be muddled, the American
people frequently will be surprised by the resentment the United
States meets overseas, and the military will not be given the
resources necessary to carry out its missions - such as more
troops trained for a "constabulary" role of peacekeeping and
suppressing minor attacks, along the lines of the 19th century
British military.
But Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Bacevich split on the ultimate cost of
taking an imperialist course. Like many critics of empire, such as
the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who in 1999 wrote
a book called "A Republic, Not an Empire,"Mr. Bacevich worries
that imperialism abroad could carry a high cost at home.
"Tom Donnelly sees all of that as really neat, exciting,
return-of-the-Raj adventure," he said.
"I see it as merely unavoidable, and suspect that we'll end up
paying a higher cost, morally and materially, than we currently can
imagine."
Mr. Donnelly responds that such concerns lack historical basis. He
notes that as America has grown more powerful over the last 150
years, so too has it expanded domestic liberties, freeing its slaves
and extending voting and other rights to women and minorities.
For an idea with so few public adherents, there are a surprising
number of critics of proposals for taking up the imperialist burden.
In a 1999 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, for
example, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, then President Clinton's national
security adviser, argued that "we are the first global power in
history that is not an imperial power."
Many of the critics believe that embracing an imperial stance
would backfire precisely because of the foreign reaction it would
provoke, or maybe already is provoking.
"People have got our number," said Chalmers Johnson, president
of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an independent organization
outside San Diego. He believes that the United States is pursuing
an imperialist course, and that "coalitions are forming left and right
around the world to thwart it." Mr. Johnson points to closer
cooperation between Russia and China, to a united Europe that is
becoming less of an ally and more of a competitor, and to the swift
rise of the anti-globalization movement.
Last year, Mr. Johnson published a book titled "Blowback: The
Costs and Consequences of American Empire." It was, he said,
"ignored" in the United States.
To his critics, Mr. Donnelly responds that they are arguing with
reality, not with him: "I think Americans have become used to
running the world and would be very reluctant to give it up, if they
realized there were a serious challenge to it."